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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ' ' 



THE ATHEN/tUM PRESS SERIES 

G. L. KITTREDGE and C. T. WINCHESTER 

GENERAL EDITORS 



Zbe 
Htben^um press Series. 

This series is intended to furnish a 
library of the best English Hterature 
from Chaucer to the present time in a 
form adapted to the needs of both the 
student and the general reader. The 



works selected are carefully edited, with 
biographical and critical introductions, 
full explanatory notes, and other neces- 
sary apparatus. 



SELECTIONS 



FROM THE 



ESSAYS OF FRANCIS JEFFREY 



EDITED 

WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

BY 

LEWIS E. GATES 

INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY 




3i^2-;s^ 



BOSTON, U.S.A. 

GINN & COMPANY, PUBLISHERS 

i8q4 



K 



iKf 



Copyright, 1894, 
By lewis E. gates. 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 




PREFACE. 



The following Selections from Jeffrey's Essays have a 
three-fold purpose : first, to illustrate Jeffrey's style and 
methods as a critic and his most characteristic opinions ; 
secondly, to give examples of what was in its day deemed 
the best literary criticism, with a view to suggesting the 
changes in methods and aims that have since been 
wrought ; thirdly, to bring together elementary discus- 
sions of a few terms and topics in literature which 
students are always supposed to be familiar with, but 
which they can hardly find treated in ordinary manuals 
or reference-books. With these aims in mind it has 
seemed best to limit the Selections to essays on literature. 
This limitation ensures unity, and the resulting volume 
may well be used by classes that are beginning the inde- 
pendent study of literary topics and of methods of 
criticism. 

On the other hand, this limitation prevents the Selec- 
tions from doing justice to Jeffrey's versatility, and from 
illustrating satisfactorily certain points on which much 
stress is laid in the Introduction, — the range of the 
Edinburgh essays, and their courage and vigor in the 
treatment of religious, social, and political questions. 
The reader who wishes illustrations of these points, 
must consult Jeffrey's four volumes of Contributio7is 



IV PREFACE, 

to the Edinburgh Review, or turn to the files of the 
periodical. 

The text of the Selections is entire as far as it goes, 
except in four essays, where omissions are marked by- 
stars ; but every Selection ends, when Jeffrey turns from 
his discussion of general questions, and begins to deal 
specifically with the book before him by means of sum- 
maries and extracts. It has not been thought worth 
while to mark this form of incompleteness with stars. 

The best short sketch of Jeffrey's life is that of Mr. 
Leslie Stephen in the Dictionary of National Biography ; 
the standard biography is Lord Cockburn'S Life and Cor- 
resp07idence of Lord /ejfrey, in two volumes. 

The text of the Selections, including punctuation and 
spelling, is precisely that of the London edition of 1844, 
save for the correction of a few obvious and trifling 
misprints. 

Harvard University. 
December 26, 1893. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

Introduction vii 

I. Jeffrey's Fame vii 

II. Jeffrey the Critic x 

III. The Edinburgh Review xxx 

IV. The Earlier Reviews xxxiv 

V. The New Literary Form xl 

Selections from Jeffrey's Essays i 

Chronological List of Essays 183 

Dates in Jeffrey's Life 184 

English Reviews 185 

Notes 187 



INTRODUCTION. 



I. 



During the thirty years after his death Francis Jeffrey 
was remembered in literature with very httle honor. 
Those of his essays that were most often recalled were 
his attacks on the Lake poets ; and as Wordsworth and 
Coleridge had ultimately persuaded the public, or the 
larger part of it, to take their poetry at their own valua- 
tion, Jeffrey's reputation as a critic suffered proportionally. 

Of late years, however, two sets of causes have been 
tending to gain for Jeffrey a second hearing and to secure 
for him a fair recognition. In the first place, the mystical 
view of life, which he found so offensive in Wordsworth 
and attacked so relentlessly, has been more and more 
falling into disfavor, and giving place to a positive and 
scientific habit of thought. The positivism of to-day is 
not Jeffrey's positivism, and our insensibility to Words- 
worth is not Jeffrey's insensibility ; and yet the temper 
of our time is perhaps nearer like Jeffrey's than like 
Wordsworth's ; and Jeffrey's frank, comprehensible blun- 
ders are nearer tolerable to a latter-day, prose-loving 
public than are the extravagances and cloudy mysticism 
of much of the poetry he assails. 

Then, in the second place, the mere passage of time 
has been in Jeffrey's favor ; the historical point of view 
has largely replaced the partisan point of view in dis- 
cussions of the early literature of the century, and a 



viii INTRODUCTION. 

scientific recognition of Jeffrey's former prestige has 
replaced an impatient dislike of his critical opinions. 
Questions of cause and effect, of action and reaction, of 
movements and tendencies, have more and more come 
to the front ; and for a student of problems of this kind 
Jeffrey is not a quantity that can be neglected. 

It is hardly possible to glance through the life of any 
literary man of the early part of the century without 
chancing on evidence of Jeffrey's popularity and prestige. 
Macaulay, for example, was a devoted admirer of Jeffrey. 
One of his letters of 1828 deals wholly with his impressions 
of Jeffrey, at whose home he had just been staying ; the 
tone of the letter is that of unmixed hero-worship ; no 
details of the Scotch critic's appearance or habits or 
opinions are too slight to be sent to the Macaulay 
household in London. " He has twenty faces almost as 
unlike each other as my father's to Mr. Wilberforce's." 
... " The mere outline of his face is insignificant. 
The expression is everything ; and such power and 
variety of expression I never saw in any human coun- 
tenance." ..." The flow of his kindness is quite 
inexhaustible." ... " His conversation is very much 
like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety." 
... " He is a shrewd observer ; and so fastidious 
that I am not surprised at the awe in which many 
people seem to stand when in his company." ^ These 
are only a few of Macaulay's details and admiring 
comments. Nor did Macaulay outgrow this intense 
admiration. In April, 1843, he writes Macvey Napier 
that he has read and reread Jeffrey's old articles till he 
knows them by heart ; - and in December, 1843, on the 
appearance of Jeffrey's collected essays, he expresses 

1 Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, chap. 3. 
~ Ibid., chap. 9. 



INTRODUCTION. IX 

himself in almost unmeasured terms : " The variety and 
versatility of Jeffrey's mind seems to me more extraordi- 
nary than ever. ... I do not think that any one man 
except Jeffrey, nay that any three men, could have 
produced such diversified excellence. . . . Take him all 
in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than 
any man of our time." ^ 

Macaulay's opinion, however, may not be wholly 
beyond suspicion. He himself had much of Jeffrey's 
dryness and positiveness of nature, and was tempera- 
mentally limited in much the same ways ; he was, more- 
over, like Jeffrey an ardent Whig of the Constitutional 
type ; and for all these reasons he may be thought to 
have been prejudiced. But in Carlyle we have a witness 
who was never for a moment in sympathy with Jeffrey's 
neat little formulas in art and in politics, and who has 
never been accused of registering unduly charitable 
opinions of even his best friends. Yet of Jeffrey he 
says, " It is certain there has no Critic appeared among 
us since who was worth naming beside him ; — and his 
influence, for good and for evil, in Literature and other- 
wise, has been very great." . . . "His Edinburgh 
Review [was] a kind of Delphic Oracle, and Voice of 
the Inspired, for great majorities of what is called the 
'Intelligent Public'; and himself regarded universally 
as a man of consummate penetration, and the facile 
princeps in the department he had chosen to cultivate 
and practise." ^ 

These quotations may stand in place of countless minor 
ones that might be marshalled ; they will serve to make 
real to readers of to-day the magnitude of Jeffrey's power 
in literary matters during the first quarter of the century. 

1 Life and Letters, chap. 9. 

2 Carlyle's Reminiscences, ed. Norton, II, 271. 



X INTRODUCTION. 

Horner's nickname for Jeffrey, " King Jamfray," ^ was 
not a misnomer. 

What, then, were the causes of Jeffrey's prestige and 
popularity? To find a satisfactory explanation, it will 
be necessary to look beyond Jeffrey's personality, beyond 
even the band of brilliant workers with whom he was 
associated, and of whose cleverness and knowledge he 
made such well-advised use. It will be necessary to take 
into account the nature of the new venture in literature 
by means of which Jeffrey won his reputation, the 
Edinburgh Review^ and to consider carefully its organ- 
ization, its relation to earlier Reviews, its principles in 
politics and on social questions, its grounds of appeal to 
the public, and even such prosaic matters as its business 
arrangements. But before taking up these broader 
questions it will be well to examine briefly Jeffrey's 
individual characteristics as a literary critic. 

11. 

The point on which Macaulay laid greatest stress in 
his praise of Jeffrey's work was its versatility ; and to-day 
as in 1843 this versatility is noteworthy, even after 
standards of acquirement and performance have had 
a half century in which to develop. Jeffrey ranges 
with the same unfaltering step over the most diverse 
fields of knowledge. He seems equally sure of himself 
in dealing with politics, history, fiction, poetry, and 
philosophy. That his air of bravado and of unquestion- 
able mastery was something of a trick, we now know very 
well. But even with our latter-day knowledge of the 
tricks of the reviewer's trade, we cannot help admiring 
and being impressed with the masterful air with which 

1 Memoirs and Correspondence of Horner, II, 140. 



INTR on UC TION. XI 

Jeffrey at one moment sketches the history of EngUsh 
poetry, at another analyzes the questions at issue be- 
tween materiahsts and ideaUsts in philosophy, now 
argues against the doctrine of perfectibility, and now 
discusses points of constitutional law and of government. 
A little careful study of Jeffrey's work will usually show 
that he has had nothing startlingly novel to say on any 
of these questions. And yet our admiration for the 
critic's cleverness of manipulation survives even a series 
of such disenchanting analyses. If these analyses fail 
to show much reserve power or originality, they make 
perfectly clear the skill of treatment, the thorough 
command of essential facts, the readiness of illustration, 
the keenness of vision within a certain range, and the 
ease of presentation, which are characteristic of Jeffrey's 
best work. Admirers of his versatility, then, will not 
claim for him great originality or vast erudition, or that 
kind of transforming insight that gives familiar facts an 
unsuspected significance by bringing them into relation 
with a new set of first principles. But they will insist on 
their right to delight in his readiness of adaptation, in his 
quick-eyed perception, in his tact in simplifying complex 
problems, and in his unfailing certainty of aim and 
sureness of motion. He always bears himself gracefully 
and confidently and threads his way with the perfection 
of sure-footing to the goal he has from the first foreseen ; 
and he does all this with equal precision and clairvoyance 
whether he is dealing with Scott's Marmion^ or the 
Memoirs of Dr. Priestley^ or Dugald Stewart's Philo- 
sophical Essays, or the French translation of Jeremy 
Bentham's Works. Jeffrey's mastery of his subject is 
like the successful barrister's knowledge of his brief ; he 
is sure to know whatever he needs to know in order to 
carry the matter in hand triumphantly through. 



Xll INTR OD UC TION. 

Indeed his readiness and his plausibility are not the 
only points in which Jeffrey the critic suggests Jeffrey the 
advocate. He has the defects as well as the merits of 
the lawyer in literature. He is always making points ; 
he is always demonstrating. The intellectual interest 
preponderates in his critical work, and his discussions 
often seem, particularly to a reader of modern impression- 
istic criticism, hard, unsympathetic, searchingly analytical, 
repellingly abstract and systematic. He is always on the 
watch ; he never lends himself confidingly to his author 
and takes passively and gratefully the mood and the 
images his author suggests. He never loiters or dreams. 
He is full of business and bustle and perpetually distracts 
you with his sense of what is coming next. He might 
well have been in Wordsworth's mind when the poet 
wrote of those who think that 

" Nothing of itself must come 
But we must still be seeking." 

Of course, however, it must be borne in mind that this 
tone and manner, so objectionable to some, and nowa- 
days perhaps not wholly winning in the eyes of any, are 
common to Jeffrey with all dogmatic critics ; and unques- 
tionably it is as a dogmatic critic that Jeffrey must be 
classed. By the theory of criticism that had been in 
vogue during the eighteenth century, there were certain 
laws of composition and principles of taste which must 
needs be observed, if the literary artist were to attain 
any degree of excellence. These laws and principles 
had been partially set down in various treatises, and in 
this form were within the ken of the critic and ready for 
his use as he might need to appeal to them in praising or 
blaming the productions of would-be authors. But even 
where these laws had not been codified, they existed, so 



INTR on UC TION. xill 

ran the ingenious and comforting theory, implicitly in the 
mind of the critic. In short, the dogmatic critic regarded 
himself and was generally regarded as able to apply abso- 
lute tests of merit to all literary work, and as the final 
authority on all doubtful matters of taste. 

Now, Jeffrey was the inheritor of this tradition in 
criticism, and naturally adopted at times its prophetic 
tone and its pontifical manner toward public and authors. 
Yet, following his temperamental fondness for com- 
promises, for middle parties and mediating measures, 
Jeffrey never tried formally to defend this old doctrine 
or represented himself as an absolute law-giver in litera- 
ture. Nowhere does he lay down a complete set of 
principles, like the rules of Bossu for epic poetry, or 
those of Rapin for the drama, by which excellence in 
any form of literature may be absolutely tested. Such 
a high-and-dry Tory theory of criticism does not suggest 
itself to Jeffrey as tenable. He is a Whig in taste as in 
politics, and desires in both spheres the supremacy of a 
chosen aristocracy. In his essay on Scott's Lady of the 
Lake he declares the standard of literary excellence to 
reside in "the taste of a few . . . persons, eminently 
qualified, by natural sensibility, and long experience and 
reflection, to perceive all beauties that really exist, as 
well as to settle the relative value and importance of all 
the different sorts of beauty." ^ Jeffrey regards himself 
as one of the choicest spirits of this chosen aristocracy, 
and it is as the exponent of the best current opinion that 
he speaks on all questions of taste. His business, then, 
is to dogmatize, to pronounce this right and that wrong, 
to praise this author and blame that one ; but his dog- 
matism is not the dogmatism of reason, but the dog- 
matism of taste ; he justifies his decisions, not by 

^ Selections, p. 39. 



XIV . INTRODUCTION. 

referring to a code of written laws from which there 
is no appeal, but by a more or less direct suggestion 
that he has all the best instructed opinion behind him. 

For the most part, therefore, in his condemnation of 
an author, he makes no use of scientific terms of disap- 
proval and he appeals to no abstract principles ; he 
simply expresses his personal discontent with the author 
in commonplace terms of dissatisfaction. Goethe's 
Wilhelm Meister, for example, is ''sheer nonsense," "ludi- 
crously unnatural," full of "pure childishness or mere 
folly," "vulgar and obscure," full of "absurdities and 
affectations." These terms are, for the most part, mere 
circumlocutions for Jeffrey's dislike, mere roundabout 
ways of saying that the book is not to his taste. As 
for any attempt to come to an understanding with author 
or reader about the ends of prose fiction or the best 
methods of reaching those ends, Jeffrey never thinks 
of such a thing. He simply takes up various passages 
and declares he does not comprehend them, or does 
not fancy the subjects they treat of, or does not like 
the author's ideas or methods. He gives no reasons 
for his likes or dislikes, but is content to express them 
emphatically and picturesquely. This is, of course, dog 
matism pure and simple, and a dogmatism, too, mor 
irritating than the dogmatism that argues, for it seems 
more arbitrary and more challenging. It is of this tone 
and method that Coleridge complains in the twenty-first 
chapter of his Biographia Literaria, when, in comment- 
ing on current critical literature, he protests against " the 
substitution of assertion for argument" and against 
"the frequency of arbitrary and sometimes petulant 
verdicts." 

But irritating as is this pragmatic, unreasoning dog- 
matism, it is nevertheless plainly a step forward from 



INTR on UC TION. XV 

the view that makes the critic absolute law-giver in art. 
As the Whig position in politics is midway between 
absolute Monarchy and Democracy, so what we may 
term the Whig compromise in criticism stands midway 
between the tyranny of earlier critics and our modern 
freedom. The mere recognition of the fact that the 
critic speaks with authority only as representing a coterie^ 
only as interpreting public opinion, is plainly a change 
for the better. The critic no longer regards himself as 
by divine right lord alike of public and authors ; he no 
longer measures literary success solely by his own little 
cut and dried formulas of excellence ; he admits more or 
less explicitly that the taste of living readers, not rules 
drawn from the works of dead writers, must decide what 
in literature is good or bad. He still, to be sure, limits 
arbitrarily the circle whose taste he regards as a valid 
test ; but it is plain that a new principle has implicitly 
been accepted, and that the way is opened for the devel- 
opment and recognition of all kinds of beauty and power 
the public may require. 

Jeffrey himself, however, seems never to have suspected 
the conclusions that might legitimately be drawn from 
the ideas that he was helping to make current. He 
seems never to have had a qualm of doubt touching his 
right to dogmatize on the merits and defects of art as 
violently as a critic of the older school. In theory, he 
held that all artistic excellence is relative ; but in practice, 
he never let this doctrine mitigate the severity of his judg- 
ments. He asserts in his review of Alison on Taste that 
" what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful, is beautiful 
to him " ; ^ and that so far as the individual is concerned 
all pleasure in art is equally real and justifiable. Yet 
this doctrine seems never to have paralyzed in the 

1 Selections, p. 154. 



XVI INTRODUCTION. 

least his faith in the superior worth of his own kind 
of pleasure ; and he rates Wordsworth and Coleridge 
just as indignantly for not ministering to that pleasure, 
as if he had some abstract standard of poetic excellence, 
which he could prove they fell short of. 

When we try to define Jeffrey's taste and to deter- 
mine just what he liked and disliked in literature, we 
find an odd combination of sympathies and antipathies. 
Mr. Leslie Stephen has spoken of him as in politics an 
eighteenth-century survival ; ^ and this seems at first a 
tempting formula to apply to his taste in literature. 
But a little consideration will show the impropriety of 
any such use of terms. The typical eighteenth-century 
man of letters is a pseudo-classicist; and beyond the 
pseudo-classical point of view Jeffrey had passed, just as 
certainly as he had never reached the Romantic point of 
view. Of Pope, for example, he says : he is " much the 
best, we think, of the classical Continental school ; but 
he is not to be compared with the masters — nor with 
the pupils — of that Old English one from which there 
had been so lamentable an apostasy." ^ Addison he con- 
demns for his " extreme caution, timidity, and flatness," ^ 
and he declares that "the narrowness of his range in 
poetical sentiment and diction, and the utter want either 
of passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe 
that he was born under the same sun with Shakespeare." ^ 
These opinions are proof patent of Jeffrey's contempt for 
pseudo-classicism. Then, too, Jeffrey is, as he himself 
boasts, almost superstitious in his reverence for Shak- 
spere.^ More significant still is his admiration for other 
Elizabethan dramatists, like Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, 
and Webster. " Of the old English dramatists," he 

1 Hours in a Library, III, 176. ^ Selections, p. 10. 

2 Selections, p. 21. 



INTRODUCTION. XVll 

assures us in his essay on Ford., ''it may be said, in 
general, that they are more poetical, and more original in 
their diction, than the dramatists of any other age or 
country. Their scenes abound more in varied images, 
and gratuitous excursions of fancy. Their illustrations, 
and figures of speech, are more borrowed from rural life, 
and from the simple occupations or universal feelings of 
mankind. They are not confined to a certain range of 
dignified expressions, nor restricted to a particular assort- 
ment of imagery, beyond which it is not lawful to look 
for embellishments." ^ Finally, he even commends Cole- 
ridge's great favorite, Jeremy Taylor, as enthusiastically 
as Coleridge himself could do : " There is in any one of 
the prose folios of Jeremy Taylor," he asserts, " more fine 
fancy and original imagery — more brilliant conceptions 
and glowing expressions — more new figures, and new 
applications of old figures — more, in short, of the body 
and the soul of poetry, than in all the odes and the epics 
that have since been produced in Europe." ^ 

All these judgments tally exactly with the faith of 
Lamb, Coleridge and Wordsworth ; and as one after 
another they fall under his eye, the reader is led to fancy 
that he has to do with a devotee of Romanticism, with a 
critic who is thoroughly in sympathy with the new spirit 
in literature. But soon, judgments of an altogether 
different nature force themselves on his notice. The 
long series of essays is encountered that discusses 
Crabbe's poetry ; and the reader sees at once how far 
Jeffrey is from welcoming heartily the new age in poetry 
or even from allowing its prophets to prophesy in peace 
and obscurity. Throughout his praise of Crabbe Jeffrey is 
by implication condemning Wordsworth ; nor does he con- 
fine himself to this indirect method of attacking Roman- 

1 Selections, p. i6. 2 Selections, p. 5. 



xviii INTRODUCTION. 

ticism. In the very first essay on Crabbe he turns aside 
from his subject to ridicule, " the Wordsworths, and the 
Southeys, and Coleridges and all that ambitious frater- 
nity," and contrasts at great length Crabbe's sanity with 
Wordsworth's mysticism. " Mr. Crabbe exhibits the 
common people of England pretty much as they are ; "^ 
whereas " Mr. Wordsworth and his associates . . . intro- 
duce us to beings whose existence was not previously 
suspected by the acutest observers of nature ; and excite 
an interest for them — where they do excite any in- 
terest — more by an eloquent and refined analysis of 
their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or 
intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation." ^ 
With Crabbe, Jeffrey feels he is on solid ground, deal- 
ing with a man who sees life clearly and sensibly, as 
he himself sees it ; and in his enthusiastic praise of the 
minute fidelity of Crabbe, of his uncompromising truth 
and realism, and of his freedom from all meretricious 
effects, from affectation and from absurd mysticism, we 
have at once the measure of Jeffrey's poetic sensibility 
and the sure evidence of his inability to sympathize 
genuinely with "the Lakers." 

Of course, for the classic passages expressing his im- 
patience of the new movement, we must go to the essays 
on Wordsworth's Exciirsio7i and White Doe. Jeffrey's 
objections to the Lakers fall under four heads: First, 
the new poets are nonsensically mystical ; secondly, they 
falsify life by showing it through a distorting medium of 
personal emotion, i.e. they are misleadingly subjective; 
thirdly, they are guilty of grotesque bad taste in their 
realism ; fourthly, they are pedantically earnest and 
serious in their treatment of art, and inexcusably pre- 
tentious in their proclamation of a new gospel of life. 

1 Selections, p. 57. 2 Selections, p. 58. 



INTR OD UC TION. xix 

To consider these points in detail would lead to a dis- 
cussion of Wordsworth and Coleridge rather than to a 
discussion of Jeffrey. Still, Jeffrey's position toward the 
Lakers is very characteristic of the man, and illustrates 
admirably both his limitations and his positive qualities ; 
moreover, his treatment of the Lakers has become a 
tradition in the history of criticism and deserves for that 
reason some discussion. A little closer examination, 
then, of the grounds of Jeffrey's objection to the new 
movement in literature will not be out of place. 

When Jeffrey praises, as he often does, the poetry of 
the Elizabethan age, delights in its passion, celebrates its 
imaginative beauty, its figurative richness, its fervor and 
wayward splendor, the reader seems to be listening to a 
genuine disciple of the new school of poetry ; and he 
cannot but expect Jeffrey to show the same hearty 
appreciation for Coleridge and Wordsworth as for the 
writings of their chosen models. Jeffrey's rejection, 
however, of the new school begins at the very point 
where for their admirers their superiority to the older 
school begins to show itself, — viz., the moment they 
commence to interpret life in terms of the infinite. 
The intenser spiritual consciousness of Wordsworth, his 
constant and unchanging recognition of the relation 
of every-day life to the unseen world, are for Words- 
worth's admirers characteristic sources of power which 
place him above the Elizabethan dramatists as an im- 
aginative interpreter of life. For Jeffrey they are the 
precise qualities which lead to Wordsworth's worst ab- 
surdities and most appallingly nonsensical rhapsodies. 
After quoting some typical passages where Wordsworth 
gives free utterance to his idealism, Jeffrey exclaims : — 
" This is a fair sample of that rapturous mysticism which 
eludes all comprehension, and fills the despairing reader 



XX INTR on UC TION. 

with painful giddiness and terror." ^ This is a perfectly 
sincere expression of genuine suffering on Jeffrey's part. 
We cannot doubt that his whole mental life was perturbed 
by such poems of Wordsworth as the great Ode^ and that 
it was an act of self-preservation on his part to burst 
into indignant ridicule and violent protest. To find a 
man of Wordsworth's age and literary experience delib- 
erately penning such bewildering stanzas and expressing 
such unintelligible emotions, shook for the moment 
Jeffrey's faith in his own little, well-ordered universe, 
and then, as he recovered from his earthquake, escaped 
from its vapors, and felt secure once more in the clear 
every-day light of common sense, led him into fierce 
invective against the cause of his momentary panic. 

Hardly less impatient is Jeffrey of Wordsworth's sub- 
jectivity than of his mysticism. Why cannot Wordsworth 
feel about life as other people feel about it, as any 
well-bred, cultivated man of the world feels about it? 
When such a man sees a poor old peasant gathering 
leeches in a pool, he pulls out his purse, gives him a 
shilling, and walks on, speculating about the state of 
the poor law ; Wordsworth, on the contrary, bursts into 
a strange fit of raving about Chatterton and Burns, and 
" mighty poets in their misery dead," and then in some 
mysterious fashion converts the peasant's stolidity into a 
defence against these gloomy thoughts. This way of 
treating the peasant seems to Jeffrey utterly unjustifiable, 
in the first place because of its grotesque mysticism, and 
in the second place because it thrusts a personal motif 
discourteously into the face of the public and falsifies 
ludicrously the peasant's character and life. Wordsworth 
has no right, Jeffrey insists, to treat the peasant merely 
as the symbol of hii own peculiar mood. Here, as in 

^ Selections^ p. 115. 



INTRODUCTION. Xxi 

his protest against Wordsworth's mysticism, Jeffrey pleads 
for common sense and the commonplace ; he is the type 
of what Lamb calls "the Caledonian intellect," which 
rejects scornfully ideas that cannot be adequately ex- 
pressed in good plain terms, and grasped "by twelve 
men on a jury." 

Crabbe's superiority to the Lakers lies for Jeffrey 
chiefly in the fact that he has no idiosyncrasies 
though he has many mannerisms ; he expresses no new 
theories and no peculiar emotions in his portrayal of 
common life. Hence his choice of vulgar subjects is 
endurable — even highly commendable. His peasants 
are the well-known peasants of every-day England, with 
whose hard lot it behoves an enlightened Whig to sym- 
pathize — from a distance. But a realism that, like 
Wordsworth's, professes to find in these poor peasants 
the deepest spiritual insight and the purest springs of 
moral life is simply for Jeffrey grotesque in its mala- 
droitness and its confusion of values. Sydney Smith 
used to say, " If I am doomed to be a slave at all, I 
would rather be the slave of a king than a cobbler." 
And this same prejudice against any topsy-turvy re- 
assignment of values was largely responsible for Jeffrey's 
dislike of Wordsworth's peasants and of his treatment of 
common life. If peasants keep their places, as Crabbe's 
peasants do, they may perfectly well be brought into the 
precincts of poetry ; but to exalt them into types of moral 
virtue and into heavenly messengers of divine truth, is to 
"make tyrants of cobblers." Jacobinism in art as in 
politics is to Jeffrey detestable. 

In fact, all the pretensions of the new school to 
illustrate by its art a new gospel of life were intensely 
disagreeable to Jeffrey. Just so long as Romanticism 
showed itself purely decorative, as in Scott or Keats, 



xxii INTR OD UC TION. 

Jeffrey could tolerate it or even delight in it. But the 
moment it begins, whether in Byron or Wordsworth, to 
take itself seriously and to struggle to express new moral 
and spiritual ideals, Jeffrey protests. Just here lies the 
key to what some critics have found rather a perplexing 
problem, — the reasons for the precise degree of Jeffrey's 
sympathy with Romanticism. Keats's luxuriant pictures 
of Greek life in Endymion^ Jeffrey finds irresistible in 
" the intoxication of their sweetness " and in the " en- 
chantments which they so lavishly present." ^ Let the 
poet remain a mere master of the revels, or a mere 
magician calling up by his incantations in verse a gor- 
geous phantasmagoria of sights and sounds for the delec- 
tation of idle readers, and Jeffrey will admire his fertility 
of invention, his wealth of imagination, his "rich lights 
of fancy " and "his flowers of poetry." For these reasons 
Moore and Campbell seem to Jeffrey the most admirable 
of the Romanticists, and their works the very best of the 
somewhat extravagant modern school. Writing in 1829, 
he arranges recent poets in the following order according 
to the probable duration of their fame : — " The tuneful 
quartos of Southey are already little better than lumber : 
— and the rich melodies of Keats and Shelley, — and the 
fantastical emphasis of Wordsworth, — and the plebeian 
pathos of Crabbe, are melting fast from the field of our 
view. The novels of Scott have put out his poetry. Even 
the splendid strains of Moore are fading into distance 
and dimness . . . and the blazing star of Byron himself 
is receding from its place of pride. . . . The two who 
have the longest withstood this rapid withering of the 
laurel . . . are Rogers and Campbell ; neither of them, 
it may be remarked, voluminous writers, and both dis- 
tinguished rather for the fine taste and consummate 

1 Selections, p. 88. 



INTR OD UC TION. xxill 

elegance of their writings, than for that fiery passion, 
and disdainful vehemence, which seemed for a time to 
be so much more in favour with the public."^ Now a 
glance at Jeffrey's list of poets makes it clear that those 
for whom he prophesies lasting fame are either pseudo- 
classicists or decorative Romanticists, and that those 
whose day he declares to be over are for the most 
part poets whose Romanticism was a vital principle. 
Rogers is, of course, a genuine representative of the 
psuedo-classical tradition, with all its devotion to form, 
its self-restraint, its poverty of imagination, and its dis- 
trust of passion. Moore, whom Jeffrey places last in 
his list of fading luminaries, and Campbell, whom he 
finds most nearly unchanging in lustre, are both in a 
way Romanticists ; but they are alike in seeking chiefly 
for decorative effects and in not taking their art too 
seriously. So long, then, as the fire and the heat of 
Romanticism spent themselves merely in giving imagi- 
native splendor to style, Jeffrey could tolerate the move- 
ment, and could even regard it with favor, as a return 
to that power and fervor and wild beauty that he had 
taught himself to admire in Elizabethan poetry. But the 
moment the new energy was suffered to penetrate life 
itself and to convert the conventional world of dead fact, 
through the vitalizing power of passion, into a genuinely 
new poetic material, then Jeffrey stood aghast at what 
seemed to him a return to chaos. Byron with his fiery 
bursts of selfish passion, Wordsworth with his steadily 
glowing consciousness of the infinite, and Shelley with 
his "white heat of transcendentalism," were all alike 
for Jeffrey portentously dangerous forces and unhealthy 
phenomena. 

In the preceding discussion of Jeffrey's relation to 

1 Jeffrey's review of Mrs. Hemans's Records of Women. 



XXIV INTRODUCTION. 

Romanticism, the most noteworthy characteristics of his 
taste in literature and art have been suggested. It is 
useless to search his writings for an attempt to justify 
these likes and dislikes, in any other way than by an 
appeal to common sense, or to the consensus of the 
best instructed opinion. His famous review of Alison 
on Taste would be the most natural place for a formal 
argument in behalf of certain favorite principles of art. 
In this review, which in a somewhat altered form stood 
for many years in the EncydopcBciia Britannica as the 
standard discussion of Beauty^ Jeffrey considers the nature 
of taste, the origin of the feelings of the Sublime and the 
Beautiful, and sundry kindred questions ; but the out- 
come of the long discussion is wholly negative so far as 
concerns the suggestion of any criterion of beauty or 
satisfactory test of the claims of conflicting schools in 
literature or in art. 

Jeffrey's arguments in the essay on Beauty cannot be 
analyzed here in detail ; analyses and comments will be 
found in the Notes. His conclusion is that the beauty of 
an object is merely the power of that object to set 
vibrating in a human heart certain subtle chords of past 
pleasure and pain ; that for any individual observer the 
object that touches his heart in this subtly conjuring 
fashion is unquestionably beautiful ; and that there are 
therefore as many kinds of real beauty as there are 
individuals with varying past experiences. This seems 
to make hopeless the attempt to set up any standard of 
taste, to say of any object, this is beautiful by divine 
right and should be so accepted by all judges. Yet 
Jeffrey seems to assert that there are such preeminently 
beautiful objects ; they are the objects which by virtue 
of " universal and indestructible " associations, do, as a 
matter of fact, set vibrating in the hearts of " the greater 



INTRODUCTION. xxv 

part of mankind," chords of past pleasure and pain. 
The unerring recognition of these objects is the charac- 
teristic of the l^esif taste. Unfortunately, Jeffrey suggests 
no rule for determining abstractly what associations are 
"universal and indestructible," and no standard by which 
the clashing judgments of rival judges can be tested. 
Hence, his famous discussion offers very little practical 
guidance to those who are trying to train their tastes, 
throws very little light on Jeffrey's own likes and dislikes, 
and suggests hardly any principles of criticism. 

In one way, however, the discussion is serviceable 
to students of Jeffrey's critical methods ; it makes 
clearer the line of thought that led him to value so highly 
the ethical interpretation of literature. Throughout the 
essay he insists on the intimate connection between a 
man's sense of beauty and his moral feelings. Beauty, 
he teaches, is the disguised suggestion of past passions, — of 
love, and pity, and fear, and hate. Now these emotions 
can be faintly re-awakened only in temperaments that 
have experienced them richly and intensely at first-hand ; 
hence a keen sense of beauty can exist only in a nature 
that has sympathized widely and generously with its 
fellows. Moreover, the character of these past moral 
emotions will condition the character of a man's feeling 
for beauty, and will determine the kind of objects that 
stimulate him aesthetically. For all these reasons, then, 
the ethical value of literature was closely connected in 
Jeffrey's thought with its aesthetic value, and the ethical 
interpretation of literature seemed to him one of the most 
important duties of the critic. 

Accordingly, in the preface to his collected essays 
Jeffrey claims special credit for his frequent use of the 
ethical point of view. " If I might be permitted farther 
to state, in what particular department, and generally, on 



XXVI INTRODUCTION. 

account of what, I should most wish to claim a share of 
those merits, I should certainly say, that it was by having 
constantly endeavoured to combine Ethical precepts with 
Literary Criticism, and earnestly sought to impress my 
readers with a sense, both of the close connection 
between sound Intellectual attainments and the higher 
elements of Duty and Enjoyment ; and of the just and 
ultimate subordination of the former to the latter. The 
praise in short to which I aspire, and to merit which 
I am conscious that my efforts were most constantly 
directed, is, that I have, more uniformly and earnestly 
than any preceding critic, made the Moral tendencies 
of the works under consideration a leading subject of 
discussion." 

This " proud claim," as Jeffrey calls it, seems amply 
justified when we compare Jeffrey's essays either with 
the critical essays in the earlier Reviews or with the more 
formal and elaborate critical essays of the eighteenth 
century. Even Dr. Johnson with all his didacticism 
had little notion of extracting from a piece of literature 
the subtle spirit of good or of evil by which it draws men 
this way or that way in conduct. An obvious infringe- 
ment of good morals in speech or in plot he was sure to 
condemn, and a formal inculcation of moral truth he was 
sure to recognize and approve. But neither in Johnson 
nor anywhere else before Jeffrey do we find a critic con- 
stantly attempting to detect and define the moral atmos- 
phere that pervades the whole work of an author, and to 
determine the relation between this moral atmosphere 
and the author's personality as man and as author. To 
have perceived the value of this ethical criticism, to have 
practised it skilfully, and to have fostered a taste for it, 
these are true claims to distinction ; and Jeffrey's services 
in these directions have been too often forgotten. The 



INTR OD UC TJON. xxvil 

greater breadth of view of later critics and their surer 
appreciation of ethical values should not be allowed to 
deprive Jeffrey of his honor as a pioneer in ethical 
criticism. 

Of the modern historical method of criticism Jeffrey 
never made thorough and consistent use. His grasp on 
the principles of the method and his ability to apply them 
are best illustrated in the essays on Ford's Dramatic 
Works (August, 1811), on Mme. de Stael's De la 
Litterature (November, 181 2), and on Wilhelm Meister's 
Apprenticeship (August, 1825). The essay on Ford con- 
tains, in the rapid survey of English poetry from the 
earliest times, a piece of work that is very characteristic 
of Jeffrey ; the readiness of handling, the sure eye for 
structure, the just distribution of emphasis, the aptness 
of phrasing and briskness of style are such as no other 
critic in 181 1 could have reached. But even more note- 
worthy is the breadth of view ; the attempt to generalize 
the qualities of the literature of the Restoration period, 
and to explain them as resulting from the social life of 
the time is a courageous and fairly effective application 
of the historical method, and must have seemed to 
Jeffrey's contemporaries startlingly original. Except 
for this essay we might have supposed that Jeffrey's 
introduction to the historicaj method came through 
Mme. de Stael's work on the relations between literature 
and social institutions. But this work was not published 
till 18 1 2, whereas Jeffrey's essay on Ford dates from 
1811. 

The most interesting of all the passages, however, 
where Jeffrey applies or discusses the historical method 
is the introduction to the essay on Wilhelm Meister, 
written in 1825. Here Jeffrey comes surprisingly near 
anticipating Taine in a formal statement of the race, 



xxviu INTRODUCTION. 

milieu, and moment theory of literature. The passage 
will be found on pages 159-164 of this volume. It will 
be seen that in this essay Jeffrey totally disregards race 
as a modifying force ; he takes it for granted that 
" human nature is everywhere fundamentally the same." 
Taine's other two forces, — moment and milieu, — Jeffrey 
defines in words which Taine would have accepted with 
very little alteration. "The circumstances which have 
distinguished [literature] into so many local varieties 
. . . may be divided into two great classes, — the one 
embracing all that relates to the newness or antiquity 
of the society to which they belong, or, in other words, 
to the stage which any particular nation has attained 
in that progress from rudeness to refinement, in which 
all are engaged ; — the other comprehending what may 
be termed the accidental causes by which the character 
and condition of communities may be affected ; such as 
their government, their relative position as to power and 
civilization to neighboring countries, their prevailing 
occupations, determined in some degree by the capabili- 
ties of their soil and climate." ^ This is to all intents 
and purposes the classification that Taine makes in the 
famous Introduction to his Histoire de la litterature 
anglaise} 

Despite, however, his cigar perception of the principles 
on which the use of the historical method rests, Jeffrey 
is never to be trusted to make; intelligent and effective 
use of the method, or to be faithful to the point of view 
it presupposes. He is specially apt to be unhistorical 
when he treats of the beginnings either of literature or 
of institutions. He lacked the knowledge of facts 
which alone could render possible a fruitfully historical 

1 Selections, p. 1 59. 

2 Cf. Notes, pp. 211-15. 



INTRODUCTION. . xxix 

conception. His construction of early periods is always 
a priori in terms of a cheap psychology. His account, 
in the essay on Leckie, of the origin of government, 
should be compared with his description of the earliest 
attempts at poetic composition. In both cases he has 
a great deal to say about what " it was natural " for the 
earliest experimenters in each kind of work to aim at 
and to effect, and he has substantially nothing to say 
of the actual facts as determined by investigation. 
Moreover, these earliest experimenters are for Jeffrey 
marvellously like eighteenth-century connoisseurs^ con- 
fronting consciously, and trying to solve reflectively, 
intricate problems in art or in politics. This view is, of 
course, unhistorical, and illustrates the difficulty Jeffrey 
had in escaping from old ways of thought. 

Finally, Jeffrey never applies the historical method 
successfully to the study of any contemporary piece of 
literature ; almost his sole attempt so to use the his- 
torical method is in his essay on Wilheh7i Meister^ and 
the inadequacy of his treatment there is such as to make 
the reader admire his discretion in not oftener trying to 
interpret historically the life and art of his own day. 
His failure to appreciate the mad revolt of Byron and 
Shelley against the conventionalism and poverty of 
eighteenth-century moral ideals has already been noted, 
as well as his corresponding failure to comprehend 
Wordsworth's high conservatism. Perhaps the most 
damaging accusation, that can be made against Jeffrey, 
as a critic, is inability to read and interpret the age in 
which he lived. 

Jeffrey's imperfect grasp of the historical method is 
shown in one other way ; he never realized that there 
was any conflict between his work as a dogmatic critic 
and his work as a scientific student of literature, and 



XXX INTR on UC TJON. 

apparently he never had a premonition of the blighting 
effect the historical method was ultimately to have on the 
prestige of the dogmatic critic. The history of criticism 
since Jeffrey's day has been largely the history of the 
decline in power of the dogmatic critic. Critics to-day 
explain and interpret, or else they translate for their 
readers by means of beautiful symbols their dim and 
obscure sensations of pleasure and pain in reading a 
piece of literature. They are scientific or they are 
impressionistic ; they rarely dogmatize ; and when they 
dogmatize, they speak with a fine consciousness of their 
human fallibility, which is curiously unlike the confidence 
of Jeffrey and his compeers. This change Jias been 
brought about partly by the Romantic movement with its 
fostering of individualism in art, and partly by the spread 
of historical conceptions in all departments of thought. 
Both these forces were in full play during Jeffrey's 
life, and of neither did he at all measure the scope or 
significance. 



III. 



It remains to speak of the new venture in literature 
with which Jeffrey's name and fame are always con- 
nected, the Edijiburgh Review^ and to consider what 
causes, apart from Jeffrey's personality, can be suggested 
to account for its prompt and unexampled success. 

The story of the foundation of the Review has been 
told so often that it will hardly bear repeating. The 
classical account is Sydney Smith's and is to be found in 
the Preface of his collected Works ; it has been repro- 
duced in Lord Cockburn's Life of feff?'ey ^ and in the Life 

1 Ed. Philadelphia, 1852, I, loi. 



INTR OD UC TION. xxxi 

and Times of Lord Brougham} With his usual crabbed- 
ness Brougham disputes a few minor details, but he 
leaves the substantial-accuracy of " Sydney's " story unim- 
peached. The main facts may be briefly set together. 

The idea of the new Review was Sydney Smith's. The 
most important conspirators were Sydney, Jeffrey, Francis 
Horner, and Brougham. The plot was di&cussed and 
matured in Jeffrey's house in Buccleuch Place, Edin- 
burgh. Sydney Smith's famous proposal of a motto, 
Tenui musam meditamiir avena, "We cultivate literature 
on a little oatmeal," was rejected ; the " sage Horner's " 
suggestion was adopted, — a line from Publius Syrus, 
Judex damnatur cu77i Jiocens absolvitur, which foretold the 
righteous severity of tone that was to characterize the 
Review. The first number was to have appeared in June, 
1802, but owing to dilatory contributors and Jeffrey's faint- 
heartedness was seriously delayed ; it finally appeared in 
October, 1802, under the supervision of Sydney Smith. 
After the publication of the first number Jeffrey was 
formally appointed editor, and with some hesitation 
accepted the post. 

The success of the Review was from the start beyond 
all expectation. "The effect," says Lord Cockburn, 
was electrical. And instead of expiring, as many wished,^ 
in their first effort, the force of the shock was increased 
on each subsequent discharge. It is impossible for those 
who did not live at the time, and in the heart of the 
scene, to feel, or almost to understand the impression 
made by the new luminary, or the anxieties with which 
its motions were observed." ^ Lord Brougham's account 
of the matter is no less emphatic. "The success was 
far beyond any of our expectations. It was so great that 

1 Ed. New York, 187 1, I, 176. 

2 Lord Cockburn's Life of Lord Jeffrey, I, 106. 



xxxu JNTR OD UC TION. 

Jeffrey was utterly dumbfounded, for he had predicted for 
our journal the fate of the original ' Edinburgh Review,' 
which, born in 1755, died in 1756,- having produced only 
two numbers ! The truth is, the most sanguine among 
us, even Smith himself, could not have foreseen the 
greatness of the first triumph, any more than we could 
have imagined the long and successful career the Review 
was afterwards to run, or the vast reforms and improve- 
ments in all our institutions, social as well as political, it 
was destined to effect." ^ 

The subscription list of the Review grew within six 
years from 750 to 9000 ; and by 18 13 it numbered more 
than 12,000. The importance of these figures is better 
understood when the reader recollects that in 18 16 the 
London Times sold only 8000 copies daily. Moreover, 
it should be remembered that one copy of a magazine 
went much further then than it goes now, and did service 
in more than a single household. In 1809 Jeffrey boasted 
that the Review was read by 50,000 thinking people 
within a month after it was printed ; doubtless this was 
a perfectly sound estimate. 

Various causes have been suggested as contributing to 
the instant and phenomenal success of the Review^ — 
the puzzling anonymity of its articles, its magisterial 
tone, the audacity of its attacks, what Horner calls its 
" scurrility," the novelty of its Scotch origin. All these 
causes doubtless had their influence. More important 
still, however, were the wit and knowledge and originality 
of the brilliant contributors that Jeffrey rallied round him. 
Writing to his brother in July, 1803, Jeffrey thus describes 
his fellow-workers : " I do not think you know any of my 
associates. There is the sage Horner, however, whom 
you have seen, and who has gone to the English bar with 

1 The Life afid Times of Lord Brougham, I, i8o. 



INTRODUCTION. xxxiil 

the resolution of being Lord Chancellor ; Brougham, a 
great mathematician, who has just published a book upon 
the Colonial Policy of Europe, which all you Americans 
should read ; Rev. Sydney Smith and P. Elmsley, two 
Oxonian priests, full of jokes and erudition; my excellent 
little Sanscrit Hamilton, who is also in the hands of 
Bonaparte at Fontainebleau ; Thomas Thomson and 
John Murray, two ingenious advocates ; and some dozen 
of occasional contributors, among whom the most illus- 
trious, I think, are young Watt of Birmingham, and Davy 
of the Royal Institution." ^ Many of these names are 
now forgotten, but those of Sydney Smith, Brougham, 
Horner and Davy speak for themselves and are guaran- 
tees of brilliancy of style, originality of treatment, and 
vigorous thought. 

The editor and the contributors, then, must receive 
their full share of credit for the success of the new 
Review ; but their ability alone can hardly account for a 
success that converted the "blue and yellow" into a 
national institution. To explain a success so permanent 
and far-reaching, we must look beyond editor and con- 
tributors and consider the relation of the Review to its 
social environment. The Edinburgh Review came into 
being in answer to a popular need ; it developed a new 
literary form to meet this need ; and its business arrange- 
ments were such as enabled the cleverest and most 
suggestive writers to adapt their work to the require- 
ments of the reading public more readily and more 
effectively than ever before. The meaning of these 
assertions will grow clearer as we consider the differ- 
ence between the Edinburgh Review and earlier English 
Reviews. 

1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, II, 64. 



INTRODUCTION. 



IV. 



Prior to 1802 there were two standard Reviews in 
Great Britain, — the Monthly Review and the Critical 
Review. Minor Reviews there had been in plenty, of 
longer or shorter life ; but these two periodicals had 
pushed beyond their rivals and were regarded as the best 
of their kind. The Moitthly Review had been founded in 
1749 by Ralph Griffiths, a bookseller; it was Whig in 
politics and Low Church in religion. Its rival, the 
Critical Review^ of which Smollett was for many years 
editor, had been founded in 1756, and was Tory and 
High Church. These Reviews were alike in form and 
were hardly to be distinguished in externals and in 
ostensible aim from the later Ediiibiirgh Review. They 
were made up of short articles on current publications 
and professed to give trustworthy opinions of the merits 
of all new books. 

When we push beyond form and outside, however, and 
consider the contents, the scope and tone of the articles, 
the policy of the manager, and the character of the con- 
tributors, we find these earlier Reviews totally unlike the 
Edijiburgh. They were booksellers' organs, under the 
strict supervision of booksellers, and often edited by 
booksellers. They were used persistently and systemati- 
cally, though, of course, discreetly, to further the book- 
seller's business schemes, to quicken the sale in case of 
a slow market, and to damage the publications of rivals. 
They were written for the most part by drudges and 
penny-a-liners, who worked under the orders of the book- 
seller like slaves under the lash of the slave-driver. All 
these points are well illustrated in the history of the 
relations between Dr. Griffiths, editor of the Monthly^ 
and his subordinates. 



INTR OD UC TION. xxx v 

Griffiths was originally a bookseller ; and though he 
was able later to retire from this business and to devote 
himself wholly to the management of his Review^ he 
retained still the instincts of a petty tradesman, and kept 
his eye on the state of the market like a skilful seller of 
perishable wares. Of scholarship, of genuine taste and 
literary ability he had next to nothing ; but he had shrewd 
common sense, sound business instincts, tact in dealing 
with men, readiness to bully or to fawn as might be 
needful, and unlimited patience in scheming for the com- 
mercial success of his venture. 

His dealings with Goldsmith between 1755 and 1765 
and with William Taylor of Norwich between 1790 and 
1800 illustrate perfectly his policy in conducting the 
Monthly and the light in which he regarded his con- 
tributors. Goldsmith he by turns bullied and bribed 
according as poor Goldsmith was more or less in need of 
money. On one occasion he became Goldsmith's security 
with his tailor for a new suit of clothes on condition that 
Goldsmith at once write four articles for the Review; 
these articles were turned out to order, and appeared 
in December, 1758. On Goldsmith's failing to pay his 
tailor's bill in the specified time, Griffiths demanded the 
return of the suit and also of the books ; and when he 
found that Goldsmith had pawned the books, he wrote 
him abusively, terming him sharper and villain, and 
threatening him with jail. In 1759 on the appearance 
of Goldsmith's first book, Griffiths ordered one of his 
hacks, the notorious Kenrick, to ridicule the work, and 
to make a personal attack on the author. These orders 
were faithfully carried out in the next number of the 
Mo7ithly Review} 

With William Taylor of Norwich Griffiths took a very 

1 Forster's Goldsmith, London, 1848, bk. ii, p. 170. 



XXXVl INTRO D UC TIOA. 

different tone. Taylor was one of the few men of 
breeding and of parts who before 1802 condescended 
to write for Reviews, and he was moreover for many 
years the great English authority on German literature. 
For these reasons Griffiths always handled him with the 
utmost tenderness, and, even when giving him orders or 
refusing his articles, took a flattering tone of deference 
and admiration. On one occasion Taylor demanded an 
increase of pay ; Griffiths's answer gives a very instructive 
glimpse of the relations between the bookseller-editor 
and his hack-writers. The "gratuity" for review-work, 
Griffiths assures Taylor, had been settled fifty years 
before at two guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages, 
" a sum not then deemed altogether puny," and in the 
case of most writers had since remained unchanged, 
although there had been certain " allowed exceptions in 
favour of the more difficult branches of the business." 
These exceptions, however, had tended to cause much 
jealousy and heart-burning among the contributors ; for 
"it could not be expected that those labourers in the 
vineyard, who customarily executed the less difficult 
branches of the culture, would ever be cordially con- 
vinced that their merits and importance were inferior to 
any." After these laborious explanations Griffiths agrees 
to raise Taylor's compensation to three guineas per sheet 
of sixteen printed pages, though he expressly points out 
that by so doing he risks "exciting jealousy in the corps, 
similar, perhaps, to what happened among the vine- 
dressers, Matt. chap, xx." " If objections arise,"- he 
shrewdly continues, " we must resort for consolation to 
a list of candidates for the next vacancy, for in the 
literary harvest there is never any want of reapers." ^ 
Griffiths's slave-driving propensities show clearly through 

1 J. W. Robberd's Life of William Taylor, I, 130-132. 



INTRODUCTION. xxxvii 

the thin disguise of politic words. Plainly he feels 
himself absolute master of the minds and wills of an 
indefinite number of penny-a-liners ; and it is on these 
penny-a-liners that he resolves to depend for the great 
mass of his articles. 

This, then, was the character of a typical editor- 
publisher of the old-fashioned Review, and such in its 
general outlines was the policy he pursued. The results 
were deplorable. The editor-publisher prescribed to his 
hacks what treatment a book should receive. Some- 
times this was with a view to the market. " I send also 
the ' Horae Biblicae ' at a venture," writes Griffiths to 
Taylor, "... it signifies not much whether we notice 
it or not, as it is not on salcT ^ The Italics are 
Griffiths's own. Sometimes, the publisher-editor merely 
wanted to favor a friend or injure an enemy. Griffiths's 
dictation in the case of Goldsmith's first book has already 
been noted. On another occasion Griffiths sent a copy 
of Murphy's Tacitus to Taylor with the following signifi- 
cant suggestion : " One thing I have to mention, eiitre 
7ious^ that Mr. M. is one of us, and that it is a rule in our 
society for the members to behave with due decorum 
toward each other, whenever they appear at their own 
bar as authors, out of their own critical province. If a 
kingdom (like poor France at present) be divided against 
itself, ' how shall that kingdom stand .? ' " ^ jf Griffiths 
ventured on this dictation with a man of Taylor's stand- 
ing and independence, his tyranny over his regular 
dependents must have been complete and relentless. 

As a result, review-writing became purely hack-work. 
The reviewer had no voice of his own in his criticism ; 
what little individuality he might, in his feebleness, have 

1 J. W. Robberd's Life of William Taylor, I, 139. 
"^ Ibid., I, 122. 



XXXVlil INTRODUCTION. 

put into his work, had he been left to himself, dis- 
appeared under the eye of his task- master. He 
became a mere machine, praising and blaming per- 
functorily and conventionally, at the bidding of the 
editor-publisher. Mawkish adulation or random abuse 
became the staple of critical articles ; and in neither 
kind of work did the critic rise above the dead level of 
hopeless mediocrity. 

A final result of this whole system of review-managing 
and hack-writing was unwillingness on the part of men of 
position to have anything to do with review-writing. If 
a man criticised books in a Review, he felt that he was 
putting himself on a level with Kenrick, Griffiths's 
notorious hireling who had been imprisoned for libel, 
with Kit Smart, who had bound himself to a bookseller 
for ninety-nine years, and with other like wretches. 
William Taylor of Norwich was one of the few gentle- 
men who, before 1802, ventured to write for Reviews. 

With the establishment of the Edinburgh Review all 
this was changed. The prime principle of the new 
Review was independence of booksellers. The plan was 
not a bookseller's scheme, but was hatched in the fervid 
brains of half-a-dozen young adventurers in law and 
literature and politics. From the start the bookseller 
was a " mere instrument," as Brougham specially notes. 
The management of the Review was at first in the hands 
of Sydney Smith. When he set out for London his last 
words to the publisher Constable were, " If you will 
give ;^2oo per annum to your editor and ten guineas a 
sheet, you will soon have the best Review in Europe."^ 
Accordingly, the editorship was at once offered to Jeffrey, 
at even a higher salary, ;^3oo, than Sydney Smith had 
named. Jeffrey hesitated because of " the risk of general 

1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Lord Jeffrey, I, 108. 



INTRODUCTION. xxxix 

degradation."^ But he found the ;^3oo "a monstrous 
bribe " ; moreover, the other contributors were all plan- 
ning to take their ten guineas a sheet ; accordingly, after 
many qualms he swallowed his scruples and became a 
paid editor. "The publication," he wrote to his brother, 
in July 1803, "is in the highest degree respectable as 
yet, as there are none but gentlemen connected with it. 
If it ever sink into the state of an ordinary bookseller's 
journal, I have done with it." ^ 

So began Jeffrey's " reign " of twenty-six years ; and 
so ended the despotism of booksellers. Henceforth the 
editor, not the publisher, was master. It was Jeffrey who 
decided what books should be handled or rather what 
subjects should be discussed ; it was Jeffrey who deter- 
mined the price to be paid for each article, — "I had," 
he declares, "an unlimited discretion in this respect";^ 
it was Jeffrey who pleaded with the dilatory, mollified the 
refractory, and reached out here and there after new con- 
tributors ; in short, it was Jeffrey who shaped the policy 
of the Reinew and impressed on it its distinctive char- 
acter. "The sage Horner's" nickname for Jeffrey, "King 
Jamfray," was certainly apt. 

But there were several other hardly less important 
points in which the business policy of the Edinburgh 
was a new departure. The compensation for reviewing 
was greatly increased. The old price had been two 
guineas a sheet of sixteen printed pages ; the Edinburgh 
Review^ after the first three numbers, paid ten guineas a 
sheet, and very soon sixteen guineas. Moreover, this 
was the minimum rate ; over two-thirds of the articles 
were, according to Jeffrey, *' paid much higher, averaging 

1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, II, 63. 

2 Ibid., IT, 65. 

3 Ibid., I, 110. 



xl INTRODUCTION. 

from twenty to twenty-five guineas a sheet on the whole 
number." ^ 

Again, every contributor was forced to take pay ; no 
contributor, however nice his honor, was suffered to 
refuse compensation. This ' change was of the utmost 
importance ; the rule salved the consciences of many 
brilliant young professional men, who were glad of pay, 
but ashamed to write for it, and afraid of being dubbed 
penny-a-liners. By Jeffrey's clever arrangement they 
could write for fame or for simple amusement, and then 
have money "thrust upon them." With high prices and 
enforced compensation the new Review at once drew into 
its service men of a totally different stamp from the old 
hack-writers. 

Finally, the Edinburgh was published quarterly, whereas 
the old Reviews were published monthly. This change 
was for two reasons important : in the first place, writers 
had more time in which to prepare their articles and led 
less of a hand-to-mouth life intellectually; and, in the 
second place, the Review made no attempt to notice all 
publications and chose for discussion only books of real 
significance. Coleridge particularly commends this part 
of the Review's policy : "It has a claim upon the 
gratitude of the literary republic, and indeed of the read- 
ing public at large, for having originated the scheme of 
reviewing those books only, which are susceptible and 
deserving of argumentative criticism." ^ 

V. 

These, then, were the principal points in which the 
organization and policy of the Edinburgh Review 

1 Lord Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, I, no. 

2 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 21. 



INTR OD UC TION. xli 

contrasted with those of its predecessors ; and the 
influence of these changes on the tone and spirit of the 
articles in the new Review cannot well be exaggerated. 
The Edinburgh Review was not to be a catch-all for waste 
information ; it was to become an organ of thought, a 
busy intellectual center, from which the newest ideas 
were sent out in a perpetual stream through the minds of 
sympathetic readers. The Review had opinions of its 
own on all public questions. In politics, it advocated 
the principles of the Constitutional Whigs, at first in a 
non-partisan spirit, after 1808, fiercely and aggressively ; 
it pleaded for reform of the representation, for Catholic 
emancipation, for a wise recognition of the just discontent 
of the lower classes and for judicious measures to allay 
this discontent without violent Constitutional changes. 
In social matters, it urged reforms of all kinds, the repeal 
of the game laws, the improvement of prisons, the protec- 
tion of chimney-sweeps and other social unfortunates. In 
religion, it argued for toleration. In education, it attacked 
pedantry and tradition, ridiculed the narrowness of 
university ideals, and contended for the adoption of 
practical methods and utilitarian aims. In all these 
departments it criticised the existing order of things, 
always brilliantly and suggestively, and sometimes fiercely 
and radically, and stirred the public into a keener 
consciousness and more intelligent appreciation of the 
questions of the hour, social, political and religious. 

Now it is plain that, to accomplish all this, writers 
would find it necessary to go far outside of the old limits 
of book-reviewing, and to make their articles express 
their own independent ideas on various important topics 
rather than simply their critical opinions of the merits of 
new publications. And this is precisely what happened. 
A book-review became in most cases merely a mask 



xlii INTRODUCTION. 

for the writer's own ideas on some burning question of 
the hour. In other words, the establishment of the 
Edi7iburgh Review really led to the evolution of a 
new literary form ; the old-fashioned review-article was 
converted into a brief argumentative essay discussing 
some living topic, political or social, in the light of the 
very latest ideas. This kind of essay had been unknown 
in the eighteenth century, and was developed at the 
opening of the nineteenth century in response to the 
needs of the moment. 

Nor was this change in the nature of the review-article 
unremarked at the time ; Hazlitt noted it and with his 
usual sourness protested against it. "If [the critic] 
recurs," he says, "to the stipulated subject in the end, it 
is not till after he has exhausted his budget of general 
knowledge ; and he establishes his own claims first in 
an elaborate inaugural dissertation de om?ii scibili et 
quihusda7n aliis, before he deigns to bring forward the 
pretensions of the original candidate for praise, who is 
only the second figure in the piece. We may sometimes 
see articles of this sort, in which no allusion whatever is 
made to the work under sentence of death, after the 
first announcement of the title-page." ^ Coleridge, on 
the other hand, approved of the change, and commended 
the " plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or 
mediocrity wisely left to sink into oblivion by their own 
weight, with original essays on the most interesting 
subjects of the time, religious or political ; in which the 
titles of the books or pamphlets prefixed furnish only the 
name and occasion of the disquisition." ^ The reviewers 
themselves recognized, of course, the change they were 
working, though they did not altogether realize its 

1 Hazlitt's Table Talk, series ii, essay 6. 

2 Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, chap. 2i. 



INTRODUCTION. xliii 

significance. In 1807, Horner writes Jeffrey, "Have 
you any good subjects in view for your nineteenth ? 
There are two I wish you, yourself., would undertake, if 
you can pick up books that would admit of them."^ This 
quotation illustrates the fact that the important question 
in the minds of the reviewers was always, not "What new 
books have appeared ? " but " What topics just now have 
the greatest actuality and are best worth discussing ? " 

This, then, was largely the cause of the success of the 
Review : it offered, in its articles, a literary form by 
means by which the most active and original minds could 
at once come into communication with "the intelligent 
public '" on all vital topics ; it made the best thought and 
the newest knowledge more readily available than ever 
before for readers who were every day becoming more 
alive to their value. 

The times were plainly favorable. The French Revo- 
lution had stirred men's imaginations as they had not 
been stirred for a century, and had shaken portentously 
in all directions the foundations of belief. Traditions in 
politics, in social organization, in religion were violently 
assailed by men like Godwin, Home Tooke, and Holcroft, 
and loyally defended by enthusiastic conservatives. The 
fever of Romanticism was already making itself felt and 
was quickening men's hearts to new passions and firing 
their imaginations with new visions of possible bliss. The 
air was full of questions and doubts, of eager forecasts and 
of ominous warnings. All this ferment of life and feeling 
demanded freer utterance than could be found through 
old literary forms and with old methods of publication. 

Moreover, the increasing importance of the middle class 
and the spread of popular education were favorable to 
the development of the new literary form. The number 

1 Memoirs a?id Correspondettce of Horner, I, 419. 



xliv INTR OD UC TION. 

of men who read and thought for themselves, had been 
rapidly growing. These men were not scholars or deep 
thinkers, and had no leisure to puzzle out learned 
treatises. They were over-worked professional men or 
business men, who were alive to the questions of the 
hour, who had thought over them and discussed them 
wherever and whenever they could, and who were anxious 
for guidance from ''men of light and leading." The 
essays of the new Review gave them just what they 
wanted, — brief, clear, yet original and suggestive disser- 
tations by the best-trained minds on the most important 
current topics. 

These, then, are some of the causes, over and beyond 
Jeffrey's editorial skill, and the brilliancy and originality 
of his co-workers, that led to the unprecedented success 
of the Edinburgh Review. Their importance and their 
significance are shown by the fact that within a few 
years several other Reviews were founded on precisely 
the same plan with the Edijiburgh^ and soon rivalled it in 
popular favor. In 1809 the Tory Quarterly Review was 
started with William Gifford as editor, and Scott, Southey, 
Canning, Ellis, and Croker among its contributors. In 
1820 the Retrospective Review was established, and in 
1824 the Westminster Review^ the organ of the Radicals ; 
Bentham was its patron, Bowring its editor, and James 
Mill and John Stuart Mill were constant contributors. 
These Reviews were all quarterlies, and in the details of 
their organization were modeled after the famous Edi7i- 
burgh. They all found a ready welcome and, with the 
exception of the Retrospective^ have continued to thrive 
down to our own day. 

In the sixties, however, there came a still further 
development of the Review ; the Eortnightly Review and 
the Co?itemporary Review were established, — periodicals 



INTR OD UC TION. xl V 

that retain of the original Review nothing but the title. 
They have thrown away the mask of the review-article, 
and publish directly, over the author's name, brief dis- 
cussions of whatever serious topics the public most care 
to hear about. The discussions appear monthly, and 
are somewhat less elaborate than the articles of the old 
Quarterlies, but are fully as thoughtful and suggestive 
and stimulating. These so-called Reviews evidently 
represent one step forward in the process of adaptation 
by means of which the writings of serious authors are 
enabled to respond quickly and completely to the needs 
of the public ; the establishment of the Edi7ih2irgh Review 
was merely one of the earlier steps in the same process 
of adaptation. 



DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 



With an Introduction and Explanatory Notes. By Henry Weber, 
Esq. 2 vols. 8vo, pp. 950. Edinburgh and London, 1811. 



All true lovers of English poetry have been long in 
love with the dramatists of the time of Elizabeth and 
James ; and must have been sensibly comforted by their 
late restoration to some degree of favour and notoriety. 
If there was any good reason, indeed, to believe that the 5 
notice which they have recently attracted proceeded from 
any thing but that indiscriminate rage for editing and 
annotating by which the present times are so happily 
distinguished, we should be disposed to hail it as the 
most unequivocal symptom of improvement in public 10 
taste that has yet occurred to reward and animate our 
labours. At all events, however, it gives us a chance for 
such an improvement ; by placing in the hands of many, 
who would not otherwise have heard of them, some of 
those beautiful performances which we have always 15 
regarded as among the most pleasing and characteristic 
productions of our native genius. 

Ford certainly is not the best of those neglected 
writers, — nor Mr. Weber by any means the best of 
their recent editors. But we cannot resist the oppor- 20 
tunity which this publication seems to afford, of saying 
a word or two of a class of writers, whom we have long 
worshipped in secret with a sort of idolatrous veneration, 
and now find once more brought forward as candidates 
for public applause. The aera to which they belong, 



2 DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

indeed, has always appeared to us by far the brightest in 
the history of EngUsh literature, — or indeed of human 
intellect and capacity. There never was, any where, 
any thing like the sixty or seventy years that elapsed 
5 from the middle of Elizabeth's reign to the period of the 
Restoration. In point of real force and originality of 
genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the age of 
Augustus, nor the times of Leo X., nor of Louis XIV., 
can come at all into comparison : For, in that short 

lo period, we shall find the names of almost all the very 
great men that this nation has ever produced, — the 
names of Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Spenser, and 
Sydney, — and Hooker, and Taylor, and Barrow, and 
Raleigh, — and Napier, and Milton, and Cudworth, 

15 and Hobbes, and many others ; — men, all of them, not 
merely of great talents and accomplishments, but of vast 
compass and reach of understanding, and of minds truly 
creative and original ; — not perfecting art by the deli- 
cacy of their taste, or digesting knowledge by the 

20 justness of their reasonings ; but making vast and 
substantial additions to the materials upon which taste 
and reason must hereafter be employed, — and enlarging 
to an incredible and unparalleled extent, both the stores 
and the resources of the human faculties. 

25 Whether the brisk concussion which was given to 
men's minds by the force of the Reformation had much 
effect in producing this sudden development of British 
genius, we cannot undertake to determine. For our own 
part, we should be rather, inclined to hold, that the 

30 Reformation itself was but one symptom or effect of 
that great spirit of progression and improvement which 
had been set in operation by deeper and more general 
causes ; and which afterwards blossomed out into this 
splendid harvest of authorship. But whatever may have 



DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 3 

been the causes that determined the appearance of those 
great works, the fact is certain, not only that they 
appeared together in great numbers, but that they 
possessed a common character, which, in spite of the 
great diversity of their subjects and designs, would have 5 
made them be classed together as the works of the same 
order or description of men, even if they had appeared 
at the most distant intervals of time. They are the 
works of Giants, in short, — and of Giants of one nation 
and family ; — and their characteristics are, great force, 10 
boldness, and originality ; together with a certain raci- 
ness of English peculiarity, which distinguishes them 
from all those performances that have since been 
produced among ourselves, upon a more vague and 
general idea of European excellence. Their sudden 15 
appearance, indeed, in all this splendour of native 
luxuriance, can only be compared to what h^pens on 
the breaking up of a virgin soil, — where all the 
indigenous plants spring up at once with a rank and 
irrepressible fertility, and display whatever is peculiar or 20 
excellent in their nature, on a scale the most conspicuous 
and magnificent. The crops are not indeed so clean, as 
where a more exhausted mould has been stimulated by 
systematic cultivation ; nor so profitable, as where their 
quality has been varied by a judicious admixture of 25 
exotics, and accommodated to the demands of the 
universe by the combinations of an unlimited trade. 
But to those whose chief object of admiration is the 
living power and energy of vegetation, and who take 
delight in contemplating the various forms of her 30 
unforced and natural perfection, no spectacle can be 
more rich, splendid, or attractive. 

In the times of which we are speaking, classical 
learning, though it had made great progress, had by no 



4 DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

means become an exclusive study ; and the ancients had 
not yet been permitted to subdue men's minds to a sense 
of hopeless inferiority, or to condemn the moderns to the 
lot of humble imitators. They were resorted to, rather 
5 to furnish materials and occasional ornaments, than as 
models for the general style of composition ; and, while 
they enriched the imagination, and insensibly improved 
the taste of their successors, they did not at all restrain 
their freedom, or impair their originality. No common 

10 standard had yet been erected, to which all the works of 
European genius were required to conform ; and no 
general authority was acknowledged, by which all private 
or local ideas of excellence must submit to be corrected. 
Both readers and authors were comparatively few in 

15 number. The former were infinitely less critical and 
difficult than they have since become ; and the latter, if 
they were not less solicitous about fame, were at least 
much less jealous and timid as to the hazards which 
attended its pursuit. Men, indeed, seldom took to 

20 writing in those days, unless they had a great deal of 
matter to communicate ; and neither imagined that they 
could make a reputation by delivering commonplaces in 
an elegant manner, or that the substantial value of their 
sentiments would be disregarded for a little rudeness or 

25 negligence in the finishing. They were habituated, 
therefore, both to depend upon their own resources, and 
to draw upon them without fear or anxiety ; and followed 
the dictates of their own taste and judgment, without 
standing much in awe of the ancients, of their readers, 

30 or of each other. 

The achievements of Bacon, and those who set free 
our understandings from the shackles of Papal and of 
tyrannical imposition, afford sufficient evidence of the 
benefit which resulted to the reasoning faculties from 



DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 5 

this happy independence of the first great writers of this 
nation. But its advantages were, if possible, still more 
conspicuous in the mere literary character of their pro- 
ductions. The quantity of bright thoughts, of original 
images, and splendid expressions, which they poured 5 
forth upon every occasion, and by which they illuminated 
and adorned the darkest and most rugged topics to 
which they had happened to turn themselves, is such as 
has never been equalled in any other age or country ; 
and places them at least as high, in point of fancy and 10 
imagination, as of force of reason, or comprehensiveness 
of understanding. In this highest and most comprehen- 
sive sense of the word, a great proportion of the writers 
we have alluded to were Poets: and, without going to 
those who composed in metre, and chiefly for purposes 15 
of delight, we will venture to assert, that there is in any 
one of the prose folios of Jeremy Taylor more fine 
fancy and original imagery — more brilliant conceptions 
and glowing expressions — more new figures, and new 
applications of old figures — more, in short, of the body 20 
and the soul of poetry, than in all the odes and the epics 
that have since been produced in Europe. There are 
large portions of Barrow, and of Hooker and Bacon, of 
which we may say nearly as much : nor can any one 
have a tolerably adequate idea of the riches of our 25 
language and our native genius, who has not made 
himself acquainted with the prose writers, as well as the 
poets, of this memorable period. 

The civil wars, and the fanaticism by which they were 
fostered, checked all this fine bloom of the imagination, 30 
and gave a different and less attractive character to the 
energies which they could not extinguish. Yet, those 
were the times that matured and drew forth the dark, but 
powerful genius of such men as Cromwell, and Harrison, 



6 DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

and Fleetwood, &c. — the milder and more generous 
enthusiasm of Blake, and Hutchison, and Hampden — 
and the stirring and indefatigable spirit of Pym, and 
Hollis, and Vane — and the chivalrous and accomplished 

5 loyalty of Strafford and Falkland ; at the same time that 
they stimulated and repaid the severer studies of Coke, 
and Selden, and Milton. The Drama, however, was 
entirely destroyed, and has never since regained its 
honours ; and Poetry, in general, lost its ease, and its 

10 majesty and force, along with its copiousness and 
originality. 

The Restoration made things still worse : for it broke 
down the barriers of our literary independence, and 
reduced us to a province of the great republic of Europe. 

15 The genius and fancy which lingered through the usur- 
pation, though soured and blighted by the severities of 
that inclement season, were still genuine English genius 
and fancy ; and owned no allegiance to any foreign 
authorities. But the Restoration brought in a French 

20 taste upon us, and what was called a classical and a 
polite taste ; and the wings of our English Muses were 
clipped and trimmed, and their flights regulated at the 
expense of all that was peculiar, and much of what was 
brightest in their beauty. The King and his courtiers, 

25 during their long exile, had, of course, imbibed the taste 
of their protectors ; and, coming from the gay court of 
France, with something of that additional profligacy that 
belonged to their outcast and adventurer character, were 
likely enough to be revolted by the peculiarities, and by 

30 the very excellences, of our native literature. The grand 
and sublime tone of our greater poets, appeared to them 
dull, morose, and gloomy ; and the fine play of their rich 
and unrestrained fancy, mere childishness and folly : 
while their frequent lapses and perpetual irregularity 



DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 7 

were set down as clear indications of barbarity and 
ignorance. Such sentiments, too, were natural, we must 
admit, for a few dissipated and witty men, accustomed 
all their days to the regulated splendour of a court — to 
the gay and heartless gallantry of French manners — 5 
and to the imposing pomp and brilliant regularity of 
French poetry. But, it may appear somewhat more 
unaccountable that they should have been able to impose 
their sentiments upon the great body of the nation. 
A court, indeed, never has so much influence as at the 10 
moment of a restoration : but the influence of an English 
court has been but rarely discernible in the literature of 
the country ; and had it not been for the peculiar 
circumstances in which the nation was then placed, we 
believe it would have resisted this attempt to naturalise 15 
foreign notions, as sturdily as it was done on almost 
every other occasion. 

At this particular moment, however, the native literature 
of the country had been sunk into a very low and feeble 
state by the rigours of the usurpation, — the best written 20 
recent models laboured under the reproach of republi- 
canism, — and the courtiers were not only disposed to 
see all its peculiarities with an eye of scorn and aversion, 
but had even a good deal to say in favour of that very 
opposite style to which they had been habituated. It was 25 
a witty, and a grand, and a splendid style. It showed 
more scholarship and art, than the luxuriant negligence of 
the old English school ; and was not only free from many 
of its hazards and some of its faults, but possessed 
merits of its own, of a character more likely to please 30 
those who had then the power of conferring celebrity, or 
condemning to derision. Then it was a style which it 
was peculiarly easy to justify by argument ; and in 
support of which great authorities, as well as imposing 



8 DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

reasons, were always ready to be produced. It came 
upon us with the air and the pretension of being the 
style of cultivated Europe, and a true copy of the style 
of polished antiquity. England, on the other hand, had 

5 had but little intercourse with the rest of the world for a 
considerable period of time : Her language was not at 
all studied on the Continent, and her native authors 
had not been taken into account in forming those 
ideal standards of excellence which had been recently 

lo constructed in France and Italy upon the authority of the 
Roman classics, and of their own most celebrated writers. 
When the comparison came to be made, therefore, it is 
easy to imagine that it should generally be thought to be 
very much to our disadvantage, and to understand how 

15 the great multitude, even among ourselves, should be 
dazzled with the pretensions of the fashionable style of 
writing, and actually feel ashamed of their own richer 
and more varied productions. 

It would greatly exceed our limits to describe accurately 

20 the particulars in which this new Continental style differed 
from our old insular one : But, for our present purpose, 
it may be enough perhaps to say, that it was more 
worldly, and more townish, — holding more of reason, 
and ridicule, and authority — more elaborate and more 

25 assuming — addressed more to the judgment than to the 
feelings, and somewhat ostentatiously accommodated to 
the habits, or supposed habits, of persons in fashionable 
life. Instead of tenderness and fancy, we had satire 
and sophistry — artificial declamation, in place of the 

30 spontaneous animation of genius — and for the universal 
language of Shakespeare, the personalities, the party 
politics, and the brutal obscenities of Dryden. Nothing, 
indeed, can better characterize the change which had 
taken place in our national taste, than the alterations and 



DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 9 

additions which this eminent person presumed — and 
thought it necessary — to make on the productions of 
Shakespeare and Milton. The heaviness, the coarseness, 
and the bombast of that abominable travestie, in which 
he has exhibited the Paradise Lost in the form of an 5 
opera, and the atrocious indelicacy and compassionable 
stupidity of the new characters with which he has polluted 
the enchanted solitude of Miranda and Prospero in the 
Tempest, are such instances of degeneracy as we would 
be apt to impute rather to some transient hallucination 10 
in the author himself, than to the general prevalence of 
any systematic bad taste in the public, did we not know 
that Wycherly and his coadjutors were in the habit of 
converting the neglected dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher 
into popular plays, merely by leaving out all the romantic 15 
sweetness of their characters — turning their melodious 
blank verse into vulgar prose — and aggravating the 
indelicacy of their lower characters, by lending a more 
disgusting indecency to the whole dramatis personce. 

Dryden was, beyond all comparison, the greatest, poet 20 
of his own day ; and, endued as he was with a vigorous 
and discursive imagination, and possessing a mastery 
over his language which no later writer has attained, if 
he had known nothing of foreign literature, and been left to 
form himself on the models of Shakespeare, Spenser, and 25 
Milton ; or if he had lived in the country, at a distance 
from the pollutions of courts, factions, and playhouses, 
there is reason to think that he would have built up the 
pure and original school of English poetry so firmly, as 
to have made it impossible for fashion, or caprice, or 3° 
prejudice of any sort, ever to have rendered any other 
popular among our own inhabitants. As it is, he has not 
written one line that is pathetic, and very few that can 
be considered as sublime. 



I o DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

Addison, however, was the consummation of this 
Continental style ; and if it had not been redeemed about 
the same time by the fine talents of Pope, would probably 
have so far discredited it, as to have brought us back 
5 to our original faith half a century ago. The extreme 
caution, timidity, and flatness of this author in his poetical 
compositions — the narrowness of his range in poetical 
sentiment and diction, and the utter want either of 
passion or of brilliancy, render it difficult to believe that 

10 he was born under the same sun with Shakespeare, and 
wrote but a century after him. His fame, at this day 
stands solely upon the delicacy, the modest gaiety, and 
ingenious purity of his prose style ; — for the occasional 
elegance and small ingenuity of his poems can never 

15 redeem the poverty of their diction, and the tameness of 
their conception. Pope has incomparably more spirit 
and taste and animation : but Pope is a satirist, and a 
moralist, and a wit, and a critic, and a fine writer, much 
more than he is a poet. He has all the delicacies and 

20 proprieties and felicities of diction — but he has not a 
great deal of fancy, and scarcely ever touches any of the 
greater passions. He is much the best, we think, of the 
classical Continental school ; but he is not to be compared 
with the masters — nor with the pupils — of that Old 

25 English one from which there had been so lamentable an 
apostacy. There are no pictures of nature or of simple 
emotion in all his writings. He is the poet of town life, 
and of high life, and of literary life ; and seems so much 
afraid of incurring ridicule by the display of natural 

30 feeling or unregulated fancy, that it is difficult not to 
imagine that he would have thought such ridicule very 
well directed. 

The best of what we copied from the Continental poets, 
on this desertion of our own great originals, is to be 



DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. i i 

found, perhaps, in the lighter pieces of Prior. That tone 
of polite raillery — that airy, rapid, picturesque narrative, 
mixed up with wit and naivete — that style, in short, of 
good conversation concentrated into flowing and polished 
verses, was not within the vein of our native poets ; and s 
probably never would have been known among us, if we 
had been left to our own resources. It is lamentable 
that this, which alone was worth borrowing, is the only 
thing which has not been retained. The tales and little 
apologues of Prior are still the only examples of this lo 
style in our language. 

With the wits of Queen Anne this foreign school 
attained the summit of its reputation ; and has ever 
since, we think, been declining, though by slow and 
almost imperceptible gradations. Thomson was the first 15 
writer of any eminence who seceded from it, and made 
some steps back to the force and animation of our 
original poetry. Thomson, however, was educated in 
Scotland, where the new style, we believe, had not yet 
become familiar ; and lived, for a long time, a retired and 20 
unambitious life, with very little intercourse with those 
who gave the tone in literature at the period of his first 
appearance. Thomson, accordingly, has always been 
popular with a much wider circle of readers, than either 
Pope or Addison ; and, in spite of considerable vulgarity 25 
and signal cumbrousness of diction, has drawn, even from 
the fastidious, a much deeper and more heartfelt 
admiration. 

Young exhibits, we think, a curious combination, or 
contrast rather, of the two styles of which we have been 30 
speaking. Though incapable either of tenderness or 
passion, he had a richness and activity of fancy that 
belonged rather to the days of James and Elizabeth, than 
to those of George and Anne : — But then, instead of 



1 2 DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

indulging it, as the older writers would have done, in 
easy and playful inventions, in splendid descriptions, or 
glowing illustrations, he was led, by the restraints and 
established taste of his age, to work it up into strange 
5 and fantastical epigrams, or into cold and revolting 
hyperboles. Instead of letting it flow gracefully on, in 
an easy and sparkling current, he perpetually forces it 
out in jets, or makes it stagnate in formal canals ; and 
thinking it necessary to write like Pope, when the bent of 

10 his genius led him rather to copy what was best in 
Cowley and most fantastic in Shakespeare, he has 
produced something which excites wonder instead of 
admiration, and is felt by every one to be at once 
ingenious, incongruous, and unnatural. 

15 After Young, there was a plentiful lack of poetical 
talent, down to a period comparatively recent. Akenside 
and Gray, indeed, in the interval, discovered a new way 
of imitating the ancients ; — and Collins and Goldsmith 
produced some small specimens of exquisite and original 

20 poetry. At last, Cowper threw off the whole trammels 
of French criticism and artificial refinement ; and, setting 
at defiance all the imaginary requisites of poetical diction 
and classical imagery — dignity of style, and politeness 
of phraseology — ventured to write again with the force 

25 and the freedom which had characterised the old school 
of English literature, and been so unhappily sacrificed, 
upwards of a century before. Cowper had many faults, 
and some radical deficiencies ; — but this atoned for all. 
There was something so delightfully refreshing, in seeing 

30 natural phrases and natural images again displaying 
their unforced graces, and waving their unpruned heads 
in the enchanted gardens of poetry, that no one com- 
plained of the taste displayed in the selection ; — and 
Cowper is, and is likely to continue, the most popular 



DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 13 

of all who have written for the present or the last gener- 
ation. 

Of the poets who have come after him, we cannot, 
indeed, say that they have attached themselves to the 
school of Pope and Addison ; or that they have even 5 
failed to show a much stronger predilection for the native 
beauties of their great predecessors. Southey, and 
Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and Miss Baillie, have all of 
them copied the manner of our older poets ; and, along 
with this indication of good taste, have given great 10 
proofs of original genius. The misfortune is, that their 
copies of those great originals are liable to the charge of 
extreme affectation. They do not write as those great 
poets would have written : they merely mimic their 
manner, and ape their peculiarities ; — and consequently, 15 
though they profess to imitate the freest and most careless 
of all versifiers, their style is more remarkably and 
offensively artificial than that of any other class of 
writers. They have mixed in, too, so much of the 
mawkish tone of pastoral innocence and babyish 20 
simplicity, with a sort of pedantic emphasis and ostenta- 
tious glitter, that it is difficult not to be disgusted with 
their perversity, and with the solemn self-complacency, 
and keen and vindictive jealousy, with which they have 
put in their claims on public admiration. But we have 25 
said enough elsewhere of the faults of those authors ; 
and shall only add, at present, that, notwithstanding all 
these faults, there is a fertility and a force, a warmth of 
feeling and an exaltation of imagination about them, 
which classes them, in our estimation, with a much higher 30 
order of poets than the followers of Dryden and Addison ; 
and justifies an anxiety for their fame, in all the admirers 
of Milton and Shakespeare. 

Of Scott, or of Campbell, we need scarcely say any 



14 DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

thing, with reference to our present object, after the 
very copious accounts we have given of them on former 
occasions. The former professes to copy something a 
good deal older than what we consider as the golden age 

5 of English poetry, — and, in reality, has copied every 
style, and borrowed from every manner that has prevailed, 
from the times of Chaucer to his own ; — illuminating 
and uniting, if not harmonizing them all, by a force of 
colouring, and a rapidity of succession, which is not to 

10 be met with in any of his many models. The latter, we 
think, can scarcely be said to have copied his pathos, or 
his energy, from any models whatever, either recent or 
early. The exquisite harmony of his versification is 
elaborated, perhaps, from the Castle of Indolence of 

15 Thomson, and the serious pieces of Goldsmith ; — and it 
seems to be his misfortune, not to be able to reconcile 
himself to any thing which he cannot reduce within the 
limits of this elaborate harmony. This extreme fastid- 
iousness, and the limitation of his efforts to themes of 

20 unbroken tenderness or sublimity, distinguish him from 
the careless, prolific, and miscellaneous authors of our 
primitive poetry ; — while the enchanting softness of his 
pathetic passages, and the power and originality of his 
more sublime conceptions, place him at a still greater 

25 distance from the wits, as they truly called themselves, 
of Charles 11. and Queen Anne. 

We do not know what other apology to offer for this 
hasty, and, we fear, tedious sketch of the history of our 
poetry, but that it appeared to us to be necessary, in 

30 order to explain the peculiar merit of that class of writers 
to which the author before us belongs ; and that it will 
very greatly shorten what we have still to say on the 
characteristics of our older dramatists. An opinion 
prevails very generally on the Continent, and with 



DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 15 

foreign-bred scholars among ourselves, that our national 
taste has been corrupted chiefly by our idolatry of Shake- 
speare ; — and that it is our patriotic and traditional 
admiration of that singular writer, that reconciles us to 
the monstrous compound of faults and beauties that 5 
occur in his performances, and must to all impartial 
judges appear quite absurd and unnatural. Before enter- 
ing upon the character of a contemporary dramatist, it 
was of some importance, therefore, to show that there 
was a distinct, original, and independent school of liter- 10 
ature in England in the time of Shakespeare ; to the 
general tone of whose productions his works were suffi- 
ciently conformable ; and that it was owing to circum- 
stances in a great measure accidental, that this native 
school was superseded about the time of the Restoration, 15 
and a foreign standard of excellence intruded on us, not 
in the drama only, but in every other department of 
poetry. This new style of composition, however, though 
adorned and recommended by the splendid talents of 
many of its followers, was never perfectly naturalised, 20 
we think, in this country ; and has ceased, in a great 
measure, to be cultivated by those who have lately aimed 
with the greatest success at the higher honours of poetry. 
Our love of Shakespeare, therefore, is not a monomania 
or solitary and unaccountable infatuation ; but is merely 25 
the natural love which all men bear to those forms of 
excellence that are accommodated to their peculiar 
character, temperament, and situation ; and which will 
always return, and assert its power over their affections, 
long after authority has lost its reverence, fashions been 30 
antiquated, and artificial tastes passed away. In endeav- 
ouring, therefore, to bespeak some share of favour for 
such of his contemporaries as had fallen out of notice, 
during the prevalence of an imported literature, we con- 



1 6 DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

ceive that we are only enlarging that foundation of native 
genius on which alone any lasting superstructure can be 
raised, and invigorating that deep-rooted stock upon 
which all the perennial blossoms of our literature must 
5 still be engrafted. 

The notoriety of Shakespeare may seem to make it 
superfluous to speak of the peculiarities of those old 
dramatists, of whom he will be admitted, to be so worthy 
a representative. Nor shall we venture to say anything 

lo of the confusion of their plots, the disorders of their 
chronology, their contempt of the unities, or their imper- 
fect discrimination between the provinces of Tragedy 
and Comedy. Yet there are characteristics which the 
lovers of literature may not be displeased to find enu- 

15 merated, and which may constitute no dishonourable 
distinction for the whole fraternity, independent of the 
splendid talents and incommunicable graces of their 
great chieftain. 

Of the old English dramatists, then, including under 

20 this name (besides Shakespeare), Beaumont and Fletcher, 
Massinger, Jonson, Ford, Shirley, Webster, Dekkar, 
Field, and Rowley, it may be said, in general, that they 
are more poetical, and more original in their diction, than 
the dramatists of any other age or country. Their scenes 

25 abound more in varied images, and gratuitous excursions 
of fancy. Their illustrations, and figures of speech, are 
more borrowed from rural life, and from the simple occu- 
pations or universal feelings of mankind. They are not 
confined to a certain range of dignified expressions, nor 

30 restricted to a particular assortment of imagery, beyond 
which it is not lawful to look for embellishments. Let 
any one compare the prodigious variety, and wide-ranging 
freedom of Shakespeare, with the narrow round of flames, 
tempests, treasons, victims, and tyrants, that scantily 



DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 1 7 

adorn the sententious pomp of the French drama, and 
he will not fail to recognise the vast superiority of the 
former, in the excitement of the imagination, and all the 
diversities of poetical delight. That very mixture of 
styles, of which the French critics have so fastidiously 5 
comptained, forms, when not carried to any height of 
extravagance, one of the greatest charms of our ancient 
dramatists. It is equally sweet and natural for person- 
ages toiling on the barren heights of life, to be occasion- 
ally recalled to some vision of pastoral innocence and 10 
tranquillity, as for the victims or votaries of ambition to 
cast a glance of envy and agony on the joys of humble 
content. 

Those charming old writers, however, have a still more 
striking peculiarity in their conduct of the dialogue. On 15 
the modern stage, every scene is visibly studied and 
digested beforehand, — and every thing from beginning 
to end, whether it be description, or argument, or vitu- 
peration, is very obviously and ostentatiously set forth in 
the most advantageous light, and with all the decorations 20 
of the most elaborate rhetoric. Now, for mere rhetoric, 
and fine composition, this is very right ; — but, for an 
imitation of nature, it is not quite so well : And however 
we may admire the skill of the artist, we are not very 
likely to be moved with any very lively sympathy in the 25 
emotions of those very rhetorical interlocutors. When we 
come to any important part of the play, on the Con- 
tinental or modern stage, we are sure to have a most 
complete, formal, and exhausting discussion of it, in long 
flourishing orations , — argument after argument pro- 3° 
pounded and answered with infinite ingenuity, and topic 
after topic brought forward in well-digested method, 
without any deviation that the most industrious and 
practised pleader would not approve of, — till nothing 



1 8 DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

more remains to be said, and a new scene introduces 
us to a new set of gladiators, as expert and persevering 
as the former. It is exactly the same when a story is to 
be told, — a tyrant to be bullied, — or a princess to be 
5 wooed. On the old English stage, however, the proceed- 
ings were by no means so regular. There the discussions 
always appear to be casual, and the argument quite 
artless and disorderly. The persons of the drama, in 
short, are made to speak like men and women who meet 

lo without preparation, in real life. Their reasonings are 
perpetually broken by passion, or left imperfect for want 
of skill. They constantly wander from the point in hand, 
in the most unbusinesslike manner in the world ; — and 
after hitting upon a topic that would afford a judicious 

15 playwright room for a magnificent seesaw of pompous 
declamation, they have generally the awkwardness to let 
it slip, as if perfectly unconscious of its value ; and uni- 
formly leave the scene without exhausting the contro- 
versy, or stating half the plausible things for themselves 

20 that any ordinary advisers might have suggested — after 
a few weeks' reflection. As specimens of eloquent argu- 
mentation, we must admit the signal inferiority of our 
native favourites ; but as true copies of nature, — as 
vehicles of passion, and representations of character, we 

25 confess we are tempted to give them the preference. 
When a dramatist brings his chief characters on the 
stage, we readily admit that he must give them something 
to say, — and that this something must be interesting 
and characteristic ; — but he should recollect also, that 

30 they are supposed to come there without having antici- 
pated all they were to hear, or meditated on all they were 
to deliver ; and that it cannot be characteristic, therefore, 
because it must be glaringly unnatural, that they should 
proceed regularly through every possible view of the 



DRAMATIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 19 

subject, and exhaust, in set order, the whole magazine 
of reflections that can be brought to bear upon their 
situation. 

It would not be fair, however, to leave this view of the 
matter, without observing, that this unsteadiness and 5 
irregularity of dialogue, which gives such an air of nature 
to our older plays, and keeps the curiosity and attention 
so perpetually awake, is frequently carried to a most 
blamable excess ; and that, independent of their passion 
for verbal quibbles, there is an inequality and a capri- 10 
cious uncertainty in the taste and judgment of these 
good old writers, which excites at once our amazement 
and our compassion. If it be true, that no other man 
has ever written so finely as Shakespeare has done in 
his happier passages, it is no less true that there is not a 15 
scribbler now alive who could possibly write worse than 
he has sometimes written, — who could, on occasion, 
devise more contemptible ideas, or misplace them so 
abominably, by the side of such incomparable excellence. 
That there were no critics, and no critical readers in 20 
those days, appears to us but an imperfect solution of 
the difficulty. He who could write so admirably, must 
have been a critic to himself. Children^ indeed, may 
play with the most precious gems, and the most worth- 
less pebbles, without being aware of any difference in 25 
their value ; but the fiery powers which are necessary to 
the production of intellectual excellence, must enable the 
possessor to recognise it as excellence ; and he who 
knows when he succeeds, can scarcely be unconscious of 
his failures. Unaccountable, however, as it is, the fact 30 
is certain, that almost all the dramatic writers of this 
age appear to be alternately inspired, and bereft of 
understanding ; and pass, apparently without being 
conscious of the change, from the most beautiful displays 



20 DRAMA TIC WORKS OF JOHN FORD. 

of genius to the most melancholy exemplifications of 
stupidity. 

There is only one other peculiarity which we shall 
notice in those ancient dramas ; and that is, the singular, 
5 though very beautiful style, in which the greater part of 
them are composed, — a style which we think must be 
felt as peculiar by all who peruse them, though it is by 
no means easy to describe in what its peculiarity consists. 
It is not, for the most part, a lofty or sonorous style, — 

lo nor can it be said generally to be finical or affected, — or 
strained, quaint, or pedantic : — But it is, at the same 
time, a style full of turn and contrivance, — with some 
little degree of constraint and involution, — very often 
characterised by a studied briefness and simplicity of 

15 diction, yet relieved by a certain indirect and figurative 
cast of expression, — and almost always coloured with a 
modest tinge of ingenuity, and fashioned, rather too 
visibly, upon a particular model of elegance and purity. 
In scenes of powerful passion, this sort of artificial pret- 

20 tiness is commonly shaken off ; and, in Shakespeare, it 
disappears under all his forms of animation : But it sticks 
closer to most of his contemporaries. In Massinger (who 
has no passion), it is almost always discernible ; and, in 
the author before us, it gives a peculiar tone to almost 

25 all the estimable parts of his productions. 



CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 



By William Hazlitt. 8vo, pp. j^2. London, iSi'j. 



This is not a book of black-letter learning, or historical 
elucidation ; — neither is it a metaphysical dissertation, 
full of wise perplexities and elaborate reconcilements. It 
is, in truth, rather an encomium on Shakespeare, than a 
commentary or critique on him — and is written, more to 
show extraordinary love, than extraordinary knowledge of 
his productions. Nevertheless, it is a very pleasing book 
— and, we do not hesitate to say, a book of very con- 
siderable originality and genius. The author is not merely 
an admirer of our great dramatist, but an Idolator of him; 
and openly professes his idolatry. We have ourselves 
too great a leaning to the same superstition, to blame him 
very much for his error, and though we think, of course, 
that our own admiration is, on the whole, more discrimi- 
nating and judicious, there are not many points on which, 
especially after reading his eloquent exposition of them, 
we should be much inclined to disagree with him. 

1 It may be thought that enough had been said of our early 
dramatists, in the immediately preceding article ; and it probably is 
so. But I could not resist the temptation of thus renewing, in my 
own name, that vow of allegiance, which I had so often taken 
anonymously to the only true and lawful King of our English Poetry! 
and now venture, therefore, fondly to replace this slight and perish- 
able wreath on his august and undecaying shrine : with no farther 
apology than that it presumes to direct attention but to one, and 
that, as I think, a comparatively neglected aspect of his universal 
genius. 



22 CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 

The book, as we have already intimated, is written less 
to tell the reader what Mr. H. knoivs about Shakespeare 
or his. writings, than to explain to them w^hat h.Q^ feels about 
them — and zc'/ri^ he feels so — and thinks that all who 
5 profess to love poetry should feel so likewise. What we 
chiefly look for in such a work, accordingly, is a fine sense 
of the beauties of the author, and an eloquent exposition 
of them ; and all this, and more, we think, may be found 
in the volume before us. There is nothing niggardly in 

lo Mr. H.'s praises, and nothing affected in his raptures. 
He seems animated throughout with a full and hearty 
sympathy with the delight which his author should inspire, 
and pours himself gladly out in explanation of it, with a 
fluency and ardour, obviously much more akin to enthu- 

15 siasm than affectation. He seems pretty generally, in- 
deed, in a state of happy intoxication — and has borrowed 
from his great original, not indeed the force or brilliancy 
of his fancy, but something of its playfulness, and a large 
share of his apparent joyousness and self-indulgence in 

20 its exercise. It is evidently a great pleasure to him to be 
fully possessed with the beauties of his author, and to 
follow the impulse of his unrestrained eagerness to im- 
press them upon his readers. 

When we have said that his observations are generally 

25 right, we have said, in substance, that they are not 
generally original ; for the beauties of Shakespeare are 
not of so dim or equivocal a nature as to be visible only 
to learned eyes — and undoubtedly his finest passages 
are those which please all classes of readers, and are ad- 

30 mired for the same qualities by judges from every school 
of criticism. Even with regard to those passages, how- 
ever, a skilful commentator will find something worth 
hearing to tell. Many persons are very sensible of the 
effect of fine poetry on their feelings, who do not well 



CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 23 

know how to refer these feelings to their causes ; and it 
is always a delightful thing to be made to see clearly the 
sources from which our delight has proceeded — and to 
trace back the mingled stream that has flowed upon our 
hearts, to the remoter fountains from which it has been 5 
gathered. And when this is done with warmth as well 
as precision, and embodied in an eloquent description of 
the beauty which is explained, it forms one of the most 
attractive, and not the least instructive, of literary exer- 
cises. In all works of merit, however, and especially in 10 
all works of original genius, there are a thousand retiring 
and less obtrusive graces, which escape hasty and super- 
ficial observers, and only give out their beauties to fond 
and patient contemplation ; a thousand slight and har- 
monising touches, the merit and the effect of which are 15 
equally imperceptible to vulgar eyes ; and a thousand 
indications of the continual presence of that poetical 
spirit, which can only be recognised by those who are in 
some measure under its influence, or have prepared them- 
selves to receive it, by worshipping meekly at the shrines 20 
which it inhabits. 

In the exposition of these, there is room enough for 
originality, — and more room than Mr. H. has yet filled. 
In many points, however, he has acquitted himself excel- 
lently ; — partly in the development of the principal 25 
characters with which Shakespeare has peopled the fancies 
of all English readers — but principally, we think, in the 
delicate sensibility with which he has traced, and the 
natural eloquence with which he has pointed out that 
fond familiarity with beautiful forms and images — that 30 
eternal recurrence to what is sweet or majestic in the 
simple aspects of nature — that indestructible love of 
flowers and odours, and dews and clear waters, and soft 
airs and sounds, and bright skies, and woodland solitudes, 



2 4 CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 

and moonlight bowers, which are the Material elements 
of Poetry — and that fine sense of their undefinable 
relation to mental emotion, which is its essence and 
vivifying Soul — and which, in the midst of Shakespeare's 
5 most busy and atrocious scenes, falls like gleams of sun- 
shine on rocks and ruins — contrasting with all that is 
rugged and repulsive, and reminding us of the existence 
of purer and brighter elements! — which he alone has 
poured out from the richness of his own mind, without 

lo effort or restraint ; and contrived to intermingle with the 
play of all the passions, and the vulgar course of this 
world's affairs, without deserting for an instant the proper 
business of the scene, or appearing to pause or digress, 
from the love of ornament or need of repose! — He alone, 

15 who, when the object requires it, is always keen and 
worldly and practical — and Jtvho yet, without changing 
his hand, or stopping his course, scatters around him, as 
he goes, all sounds and shapes of sweetness — and con- 
jures up landscapes of immortal fragrance and freshness, 

20 and peoples them with Spirits of glorious aspect and 
attractive grace — and is a thousand times more full of 
fancy and imagery, and splendour, than those who, in 
pursuit of such enchantments, have shrunk back from the 
delineation of character or passion, and declined the dis- 

25 cussion of human duties and cares. More full of wisdom 
and ridicule and sagacity, than all the moralists and 
satirists that ever existed — he is more wild, airy, and in- 
ventive, and more pathetic and fantastic, than all the 
poets of all regions and ages of the world : — and has all 

30 those elements so happily mixed up in him, and bears his 
high faculties so temperately, that the most severe reader 
cannot complain of him for want of strength or of reason 
— nor the most sensitive for defect of ornament or 
ingenuity. Every thing in him is in unmeasured abund- 



CHARACTERS OF SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS. 25 

ance, and unequalled perfection — but every thing so 
balanced and kept in subordination, as not to jostle or 
disturb or take the place of another. The most exquisite 
poetical conceptions, images, and descriptions, are given 
with such brevity, and introduced with such skill, as 5 
merely to adorn, without loading the sense they accom- 
pany. Although his sails are purple and perfumed, and 
his prow of beaten gold, they waft him on his voyage, not 
less, but more rapidly and directly than if they had been 
composed of baser materials. All his excellences, like 10 
those of Nature herself, are thrown out together ; and, 
instead of interfering with, support and recommend each 
other. His flowers are not tied up in garlands, nor his 
fruits crushed into baskets — but spring living from the 
soil, in all the dew and freshness of youth ; while the 15 
graceful foliage in which they lurk, and the ample 
branches, the rough and vigorous stem, and the wide- 
spreading roots on which they depend, are present along 
with them, and share, in their places, the equal care of 
their Creator. 20 



RELIOUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 



Consisti?tg chiefly of Original Letters, Poems, and Critical Observa- 
tions on Scottish Songs. Collected and published by R. H. Cromek. 
8vo, pp. 4^0. London, 1808. 



Burns is certainly by far the greatest of our poetical 
prodigies — from Stephen Duck down to Thomas Der- 
mody. They are forgotten already ; or only remembered 
for derision. But the name of Burns, if we are not 

5 mistaken, has not yet "gathered all its fame"; and will 
endure long after those circumstances are forgotten 
which contributed to its first notoriety. So much indeed 
are we impressed with a sense of his merits, that we 
cannot help thinking it a derogation from them to 

10 consider him as a prodigy at all ; and are convinced that 
he will never be rightly estimated as a poet, till that 
vulgar wonder be entirely repressed which was raised on 
his having been a ploughman. It is true, no doubt, that 
he was born in an humble station ; and that much of his 

15 early life was devoted to severe labour, and to the 
society of his fellow-labourers. But he was not himself 
either uneducated or illiterate ; and was placed in a 
situation more favourable, perhaps, to the development 
of great poetical talents, than any other which could 

20 have been assigned him. He was taught, at a very early 
age, to read and write ; and soon after acquired a 
competent knowledge of French, together with the 
elements of Latin and Geometry. His taste for reading 



RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 27 

was encouraged by his parents and many of his asso- 
ciates ; and, before he had ever composed a single 
stanza, he was not only familiar with many prose writers, 
but far more intimately acquainted with Pope, Shake- 
speare, and Thomson, than nine tenths of the youth that 5 
now leave our schools for the university. Those authors, 
indeed, with some old collections of songs, and the lives 
of Hannibal and of Sir William Wallace, were his 
habitual study from the first days of his childhood ; and 
co-operating with the solitude of his rural occupations, 10 
were sufficient to rouse his ardent and ambitious mind to 
the love and the practice of poetry. He had about as 
much scholarship, in short, we imagine, as Shakespeare ; 
and far better models to form his ear to harmony, and 
train his fancy to graceful invention. 15 

We ventured, on a former occasion, to say something 
of the effects of regular education, and of the general 
diffusion of literature, in repressing the vigour and 
originality of all kinds of mental exertion. That specu- 
lation was perhaps carried somewhat too far ; but if the 20 
paradox have proof any where, it is in its application to 
poetry. Among well educated people, the standard 
writers of this description are at once so venerated and 
so familiar, that it is thought equally impossible to rival 
them, as to write verses without attempting it. If there 25 
be one degree of fame which excites emulation, there is 
another which leads to despair : Nor can we conceive 
any one less likely to be added to the short list of original 
poets, than a young man of fine fancy and delicate taste, 
who has acquired a high relish for poetry, by perusing 30 
the most celebrated writers, and conversing with the 
most intelligent judges. The head of such a person is 
filled, of course, with all the splendid passages of ancient 
and modern authors, and with the fine and fastidious 



28 RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 

remarks which have been made even on those passages. 
When he turns his eyes, therefore, on his own conceptions 
or designs, they can scarcely fail to appear rude and 
contemptible. He is perpetually haunted and depressed 
5 by the ideal presence of those great masters, and their 
exacting critics. He is aware to what comparisons his 
productions will be subjected among his own friends and 
associates ; and recollects the derision with which so 
many rash adventurers have been chased back to their 

10 obscurity. Thus, the merit of his great predecessors 
chills, instead of encouraging his ardour ; and the 
illustrious names which have already reached to the 
summit of excellence, act like the tall and spreading 
trees of the forest, which overshadow and strangle the 

15 saplings which may have struck root in the soil below — 
and afford efficient shelter to nothing but creepers and 
parasites. 

There is, no doubt, in some few individuals, " that 
strong divinity of soul " — that decided and irresistible 

20 vocation to glory, which, in spite of all these obstructions, 
calls out, perhaps once or twice in a century, a bold and 
original poet from the herd of scholars and academical 
literati. But the natural tendency of their studies, and 
by far their most common effect, is to repress originality, 

25 and discourage enterprise ; and either to change those 
whom nature meant for poets, into mere readers of 
poetry, or to bring them out in the form of witty 
parodists, or ingenious imitators. Independent of the 
reasons which have been already suggested, it will perhaps 

30 be found, too, that necessity is the mother of invention, 
in this as well as in the more vulgar arts ; or, at least, 
that inventive genius will frequently slumber in inaction, 
where the preceding ingenuity has in part supplied the 
wants of the owner. A solitary and uninstructed man, 



RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 29 

with lively feelings and an inflammable imagination, will 
often be irresistibly led to exercise those gifts, and to 
occupy and relieve his mind in poetical composition : 
But if his education, his reading, and his society supply 
him with an abundant store of images and emotions, he 5 
will probably think but little of those internal resources, 
and feed his mind contentedly with what has been 
provided by the industry of others. 

To say nothing, therefore, of the distractions and the 
dissipation of mind that belong to the commerce of the 10 
world, nor of the cares of minute accuracy and high 
finishing which are imposed on the professed scholar, 
there seem to be deeper reasons for the separation of 
originality and accomplishment ; and for the partiality 
which has led poetry to choose almost all her prime 15 
favourites among the recluse and uninstructed. A youth 
of quick parts, in short, and creative fancy ^ — with just so 
much reading as to guide his ambition, and roughhew his 
notions of excellence — if his lot be thrown in humble 
retirement, where he has no reputation to lose, and 20 
where he can easily hope to excel all that he sees around 
him, is much more likely, we think, to give himself up to 
poetry, and to train himself to habits of invention, than if 
he had been encumbered by the pretended helps of ex- 
tended study and literary society. 25 

If these observations should fail to strike of themselves, 
they may perhaps derive additional weight from consider- 
ing the very remarkable fact, that almost all the great 
poets of every country have appeared in an early stage of 
their history, and in a period comparatively rude and un- 30 
lettered. Homer went forth, like the morning star, before 
the dawn of literature in Greece, and almost all the great 
and sublime poets of modern Europe are already between 
two and three hundred years old. Since that time, 



30 RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 

although books and readers, and opportunities of reading, 
are multipUed a thousand fold, we have improved chiefly 
in point and terseness of expression, in the art of raillery, 
and in clearness and simplicity of thought. Force, rich- 

5 ness, and variety of invention, are now at least as rare as 
ever. But the literature and refinement of the age does 
not exist at all for a rustic and illiterate individual ; and, 
consequently, the present time is to him what the rude 
times of old were to the vigorous writers which adorned 

lo them. 

But though, for these and for other reasons, we can 
see no propriety in regarding the poetry of Burns chiefly 
as the wonderful work of a peasant, and thus admiring it 
much in the same way as if it had been written with his 

15 toes ; yet there are peculiarities in his works which 
remind us of the lowness of his origin, and faults for 
which the defects of his education afford an obvious 
cause, if not a legitimate apology. In forming a correct 
estimate of these works, it is necessary to take into 

20 account those peculiarities. 

The first is, the undiciplined harshness and acrimony 
of his invective. The great boast of polished life is the 
delicacy, and even the generosity of its hostility — that 
quality which is still the characteristic, as it furnishes 

25 the denomination, of a gentleman — that principle which 
forbids us to attack the defenceless, to strike the fallen, 
or to mangle the slain — and enjoins us, in forging the 
shafts of satire, to increase the polish exactly as we add 
to their keenness or their weight. For this, as well as 

30 for other things, we are indebted to chivalry ; and of 
this Burns had none. His ingenious and amiable biogra- 
pher has spoken repeatedly in praise of his talents for 
satire — we think, with a most unhappy partiality. His 
epigrams and lampoons appear to us, one and all, 



RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS 31 

unworthy of him ; — offensive from their extreme coarse- 
ness and violence — and contemptible from their want of 
wit or brilliancy. They seem to have been written, not 
out of playful malice or virtuous indignation, but out of 
fierce and ungovernable anger. His whole raillery con- 5 
sists in railing ; and his satirical vein displays itself 
chiefly in calling names and in swearing. We say this 
mainly with a reference to his personalities. In many of 
his more general representations of life and manners, 
there is no doubt much that may be called satirical, 10 
mixed up with admirable humour, and description of 
inimitable vivacity. 

There is a similar want of polish, or at least of respect- 
fulness, in the general tone of his gallantry. He has 
written with more passion, perhaps, and more variety of 15 
natural feeling, on the subject of love, than any other 
poet whatever — but with a fervour that is sometimes 
indelicate, and seldom accommodated to the timidity and 
" sweet austere composure " of women of refinement. He 
has expressed admirably the feelings of an enamoured 20 
peasant, who, however refined or eloquent he may be, 
always approaches his mistress on a footing of equality ; 
but has never caught that tone of chivalrous gallantry 
which uniformly abases itself in the presence of the 
object of its devotion. Accordingly, instead of suing for 25 
a smile, or melting in a tear, his muse deals in nothing 
but locked embraces and midnight rencontres ; and, even 
in his complimentary effusions to ladies of the highest 
rank, is for straining them to the bosom of her impetuous 
votary. It is easy, accordingly, to see from his corres- 30 
pondence, that many of his female patronesses shrunk 
from the vehement familiarity of his admiration ; and 
there are even some traits in the volumes before us, from 
which we can gather, that he resented the shyness and 



32 RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 

estrangement to which those feeUngs gave rise, with at 
least as little chivalry as he had shown in producing them. 
But the leading vice in Burns's character, and the 
cardinal deformity, indeed, of all his productions, was his 
5 contempt, or affectation of contempt, for prudence, 
decency, and regularity ; and his admiration of thought- 
lessness, oddity, and vehement sensibility; — his belief, 
in short, in the dispe?isifig power of genius and social 
feeling, in all matters of morality and common sense. 

10 This is the very slang of the worst German plays, and 
the lowest of our town-made novels ; nor can any thing 
be more lamentable, than that it should have found a 
patron in such a man as Burns, and communicated to 
many of his productions a character of immorality, at 

15 once contemptible and hateful. It is but too true, that 
men of the highest genius have frequently been hurried 
by their passions into a violation of prudence and duty ; 
and there is something generous, at least, in the apology 
which their admirers may make for them, on the score of 

20 their keener feelings and habitual want of reflection. 
But this apology, which is quite unsatisfactory in the 
mouth of another, becomes an insult and an absurdity 
whenever it proceeds from their own. A man may say 
of his friend, that he is a noble-hearted fellow — too 

25 generous to be just, and with too much spirit to be 
always prudent and regular. But he cannot be allowed 
to say even this of himself ; and still less to represent 
himself as a hairbrained sentimental soul, constantly 
carried away by fine fancies and visions of love and 

30 philanthropy, and born to confound and despise the cold- 
blooded sons of prudence and sobriety. This apology, 
indeed, evidently destroys itself : For it shows that con- 
duct to be the result of deliberate system, which it affects 
at the same time to justify as the fruit of mere thought- 



RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 33 

lessness and casual impulse. Such protestations, there- 
fore, will always be treated, as they deserve, not only 
with contempt, but with incredulity ; and their magnani- 
mous authors set down as determined profligates, who 
seek to disguise their selfishness under a name somewhat 5 
less revolting. That profligacy is almost always selfish- 
ness, and that the excuse of impetuous feeling can hardly 
ever be justly pleaded for those who neglect the ordinary 
duties of life, must be- apparent, we think, even to the 
least reflecting of those sons of fancy and song. It 10 
requires no habit of deep thinking, nor any thing more, 
indeed, than the information of an honest heart, to per- 
ceive that it is cruel and base to spend, in vain super- 
fluities, that money which belongs of right to the pale 
industrious tradesman and his famishing infants ; or that 15 
it is a vile prostitution of language, to talk of that man's 
generosity or goodness of heart, who sits raving about 
friendship and philanthropy in a tavern, while his wife's 
heart is breaking at her cheerless fireside, and his chil- 
dren pining in solitary poverty. 20 

This pitiful cant of careless feeling and eccentric 
genius, accordingly, has never found much favour in the 
eyes of English sense and morality. The most signal 
effect which it ever produced, was on the muddy brains 
of some German youth, who are said to have left college 25 
in a body to rob on the highway : because Schiller had 
represented the captain of a gang as so very noble a 
creature. — But in this country, we believe, a predilection 
for that honourable profession must have preceded this 
admiration of the character. The style we have been 30 
speaking of, accordingly, is now the heroics only of the 
hulks and the house of correction; and has no chance, we 
suppose, of being greatly admired, except in the farewell 
speech of a young gentleman preparing for Botany Bay. 



34 RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 

It is humiliating to think how deeply Burns has fallen 
into this debasing error. He is perpetually making a 
parade of his thoughtlessness, inflammability, and impru- 
dence, and talking with much complacency and exultation 
5 of the offence he has occasioned to the sober and correct 
part of mankind. This odious slang infects almost all 
his prose, and a very great proportion of his poetry ; and 
is, we are persuaded, the chief, if not the only source of 
disgust with which, in spite of hrs genius, we know that 

10 he is regarded by many very competent and liberal 
judges. His apology, too, we are willing to believe, is to 
be found in the original lowness of his situation, and the 
slightness of his acquaintance with the world. With his 
talents and powers of observation, he could not have 

15 seen much of the beings who echoed this raving, without 
feeling for them that distrust and contempt which would 
have made him blush to think he had ever stretched over 
them. the protecting shield of his genius. 

Akin to this most lamentable trait of vulgarity, and 

20 indeed in some measure arising out of it, is that perpetual 
boast of his own independence, which is obtruded upon 
the readers of Burns in almost every page of his writings. 
The sentiment itself is noble, and it is often finely 
expressed ; — but a gentleman would only have expressed 

25 it when he was insulted or provoked ; and would never 
have made it a spontaneous theme to those friends in 
whose estimation he felt that his honour -stood clear. It 
is mixed up, too, in Burns with too fierce a tone of 
defiance, and indicates rather the pride of a sturdy 

30 peasant, than the calm and natural elevation of a 
generous mind. 

The last of the symptoms of rusticity which we think 
it necessary to notice in the works of this extraordinary 
man, is that frequent mistake of mere exaggeration and 



RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 35 

violence, for force and sublimity, which has defaced so 
much of his prose composition, and given an air of 
heaviness and labour to a good deal of his serious poetry. 
The truth is, that his forte was in humour and in pathos 
— or rather in tenderness of feeling ; and that he has 5 
very seldom succeeded, either where mere wit and 
sprightliness, or where great energy and weight of senti- 
ment were requisite. He had evidently a very false and 
crude notion of what constituted stre7igth of writing ; and 
instead of that simple and brief directness which stamps 10 
the character of vigour upon every syllable, has generally 
had recourse to a mere accumulation of hyperbolical 
expressions, which encumber the diction instead of 
exalting it, and show the determination to be impressive, 
without the power of executing it. This error also we 15 
are inclined to ascribe entirely to the defects of his 
education. The value of simplicity in the expression of 
passion, is a lesson, we believe, of nature and of genius ; 
— but its importance in mere grave and impressive writing, 
is one of the latest discoveries of rhetorical experience. 20 

With the allowances and exceptions we have now 
stated, we think Burns entitled to the rank of a great and 
original genius. He has in all his compositions great 
force of conception ; and great spirit and animation in 
its expression. He has taken a large range through the 25 
region of Fancy, and naturalized himself in almost all 
her climates. He has great humour — great powers of 
description — great pathos — and great discrimination of 
character. Almost every thing that he says has spirit 
and originality ; and every thing that he says well, is 3° 
characterized by a charming facility, which gives a grace 
even to occasional rudeness, and communicates to the 
reader a delightful sympathy with the spontaneous soar- 
ing and conscious inspiration of the poet. 



36 RELIQUES OF ROBERT BURNS. 

Considering the reception which these works have met 
with from the public, and the long period during which 
the greater part of them have been in their possession, it 
may appear superfluous to say any thing as to their 

5 characteristic or peculiar merit. Though the ultimate 
judgment of the public, however, be always sound, or at 
least decisive as to its general result, it is not always 
very apparent upon what grounds it has proceeded ; nor 
in consequence of what, or in spite of what, it has been 

o obtained. In Burns's works there is much to censure, as 
well as much to praise ; and as time has not yet separated 
his ore from its dross, it may be worth while to state; in 
a very general way, what we presume to anticipate as the 
result of this separation. Without pretending to enter at 

5 all into the comparative merit of particular passages, we 
may venture to lay it down as our opinion. — that his 
poetry is far superior to his prose ; that his Scottish 
compositions are greatly to be preferred to his English 
ones ; and that his Songs will probably outlive all his 
other productions. A very few remarks on each of these 
subjects will comprehend almost all that we have to say 
of the volumes now before us. 



20 



THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 



A FoefH by Walter Scott. Second Editioft. 8vo, pp. ^j^. t8io. 



Mr. Scott, though living in an age unusually prolific 
of original poetry, has manifestly outstripped all his 
competitors in the race of popularity ; and stands 
already upon a height to which no other writer has 
attained in the memory of any one now alive. We 5 
doubt, indeed, whether any English poet ever had so 
many of his books sold, or so many of his verses read 
and admired by such a multitude of persons in so short 
a time. We are credibly informed that nearly thirty 
thousand copies of " The Lay " have been already 10 
disposed of in this country ; and that the demand for 
Marmion, and the poem now before us, has been still 
more considerable, — a circulation we believe, altogether 
without example, in the case of a bulky work, not 
addressed to the bigotry of the mere mob, either religious 15 
or political. 

A popularity so universal is a pretty sure proof of 
extraordinary merit, — a far surer one, we readily admit, 
than would be afforded by any praises of ours : and, 
therefore, though we pretend to be privileged, in ordinary 20 
cases, to foretell the ultimate reception of all claims on 
public admiration, our function may be thought to cease, 
where the event is already so certain and conspicuous. 
As it is a sore thing, however, to be deprived of our 
privileges on so important an occasion, we hope to be 25 



SS THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

pardoned for insinuating, that, even in such a case, the 
office of the critic may not be altogether superfluous. 
Though the success of the author be decisive, and even 
likely to be permanent, it still may not be without its use 
5 to point out, in consequence of what, and in spite of 
what, he has succeeded ; nor altogether uninstructive to 
trace the precise limits of the connection which, even in 
this dull world, indisputably subsists between success and 
desert, and to ascertain how far unexampled popularity 

10 does really imply unrivalled talent. 

As it is the object of poetry to give pleasure, it would 
seem to be a pretty safe conclusion, that that poetry 
must be the best which gives the greatest pleasure to the 
greatest number of persons. Yet we must pause a little, 

15 before we give our assent to so plausible a proposition. 
It would not be quite correct, we fear, to say that those 
are invariably the best judges who are most easily 
pleased. The great multitude, even of the reading world, 
must necessarily be uninstructed and injudicious ; and 

20 will frequently be found, not only to derive pleasure from 
what is worthless in finer eyes, but to be quite insensible 
to those beauties which afford the most exquisite delight 
to more cultivated understandings. True pathos and 
sublimity will indeed charm every one : but, out of this 

25 lofty sphere, we are pretty well convinced, that the poetry 
which appears most perfect to a very refined taste, will 
not often turn out to be very popular poetry. 

This, indeed, is saying nothing more, than that the 
ordinary readers of poetry have not a very refined taste ; 

30 and that they are often insensible to many of its highest 
beauties, while they still more frequently mistake its 
imperfections for excellence. The fact, when stated in 
this simple way, commonly excites neither opposition nor 
surprise : and yet, if it be asked, why the taste of a few 



THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 39 

individuals, who do not perceive beauty where many others 
perceive it, should be exclusively dignified with the name 
of a good taste ; or why poetry, which gives pleasure to 
a very great number of readers, should be thought 
inferior to that which pleases a much smaller number, — 5 
the answer, perhaps, may not be quite so ready as might 
have been expected from the alacrity of our assent to the 
first proposition. That there is a good answer to be 
given, however, we entertain no doubt : and if that 
which we are about to offer should not appear very clear 10 
or satisfactory, we must submit to have it thought, that 
the fault is not altogether in the subject. 

In the first place, then, it should be remembered, that 
though the taste of very good judges is necessarily the 
taste of a few, it is implied, in their description, that they 15 
are persons eminently qualified, by natural sensibility, 
and long experience and reflection, to perceive all beauties 
that really exist, as well as to settle the relative value and 
importance of all the different sorts of beauty ; — they 
are in that very state, in short, to which all who are in 20 
any degree capable of tasting those refined pleasures 
would certainly arrive, if their sensibility were increased, 
and their experience and reflection enlarged. It is 
difficult, therefore, in following out the ordinary analogies 
of language, to avoid considering them as in the right, 25 
and calling their taste the true and the just one ; when 
it appears that it is such as is uniformly produced by 
the cultivation of those faculties upon which all our 
perceptions of taste so obviously depend. 

It is to be considered also, that though it be the end 30 
of poetry to please, one of the parties whose pleasure, 
and whose notions of excellence, will always be primarily 
consulted in its composition, is the poet himself ; and as 
he must necessarily be more cultivated than the great 



40 THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

bod)r of his readers, the presumption is, that he will 
always belong, comparatively speaking, to the class of 
good judges, and endeavour, consequently, to produce 
that sort of excellence which is likely to meet with their 
5 approbation. When authors, therefore, and those of 
whose suffrages authors are most ambitious, thus conspire 
to fix upon the same standard of what is good in taste 
and composition, it is easy to see how it should come to 
bear this name in society, in preference to what might 

lo afford more pleasure to individuals of less influence. 
Besides all this, it is obvious that it must be infinitely 
more difficult to produce any thing comformable to this 
exalted standard, than merely to fall in with the current 
of popular taste. To attain the former object, it is 

15 necessary, for the most part, to understand thoroughly 
all the feelings and associations that are modified or 
created by cultivation : — To accomplish the latter, it 
will often be sufficient merely to have observed the course 
of familiar preferences. Success, however, is rare, in 

20 proportion as it is difiicult ; and it is needless to say, what 
a vast addition rarity makes to value, — or how exactly our 
admiration at success is proportioned to our sense of the 
difficulty of the undertaking. 

Such seem to be the most general and immediate 

25 causes of the apparent paradox, of reckoning that which 
pleases the greatest number as inferior to that which 
pleases the few ; and such the leading grounds for fixing 
the standard of excellence, in a question of mere feeling 
and gratification, by a different rule than that of the 

30 quantity of gratification produced. With regard to some 
of the fine arts — for the distinction between popular and 
actual merit obtains in them all — there are no other 
reasons, perhaps, to be assigned ; and, in Music for 
example, when we have said that it is the authority of 



THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 41 

those who are best qualified by nature and study, and 
the difficulty and rarity of the attainment, that entitles 
certain exquisite performances to rank higher than others 
that give far more general delight, we have probably said 
all that can be said in explanation of this mode of 5 
speaking and judging. In poetry, however, and in 
some other departments, this familiar, though somewhat 
extraordinary rule of estimation, is justified by other 
considerations. 

As it is the cultivation of natural and perhaps universal 10 
capacities, that produces that refined taste which takes 
away our pleasure in vulgar excellence, so, it is to be 
considered, that there is an universal tendency to the 
propagation of such a taste ; and that, in times tolerably 
favourable to human happiness, there is a continual 15 
progress and improvement in this, as in the other faculties 
of nations and large assemblages of men. The number 
of intelligent judges may therefore be regarded as 
perpetually on the increase. The inner circle, to which 
the poet delights chiefly to pitch his voice, is perpetually 20 
enlarging ; and, looking to that great futurity to which 
his ambition is constantly directed, it may be found, that 
the most refined style of composition to which he can 
attain, will be, at the last, the most extensively and 
permanently popular. This holds true, we think, with 25 
regard to all the productions of art that are open to the 
inspection of any considerable part of the community ; 
but, with regard to poetry in particular, there is one 
circumstance to be attended to, that renders this conclu- 
sion peculiarly safe, and goes far indeed to reconcile the 3° 
taste of the multitude with that of more cultivated 
judges. 

As it seems difficult to conceive that mere cultivation 
should either absolutely create or utterly destroy any 



42 THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

natural capacity of enjoyment, it is not easy to suppose, 
that the quaUties which dehght the uninstructed should 
be substantially different from those which give pleasure 
to the enlightened. They may be arranged according to 
5 a different scale, — and certain shades and accompani- 
ments may be more or less indispensable ; but^the quali- 
ties in a poem that give most pleasure to the refined and 
fastidious critic, are in substance, we believe, the very 
same that delight the most injudicious of its admirers: — 

lo and the very wide difference which exists between their 
usual estimates, may be in a great degree accounted for, 
by considering, that the one judges absolutely, and the 
other relatively — that the one attends only to the intrin- 
sic qualities of the wofk, while the other refers more 

15 immediately to the merit of the author. The most popular 
passages in popular poetry, are in fact, for the most part, 
very beautiful and striking ; yet they are very often such 
passages as could never be ventured on by any writer 
who aimed at the praise of the judicious ; and this, for 

20 the obvious reason, that they are trite and hackneyed, — 
that they have been repeated till they have lost all grace 
and propriety, — and, instead of exalting the imagination 
by the impression of original genius or creative fancy, 
only nauseate and offend, by the association of paltry 

25 plagiarism and impudent inanity. It is only, however, 
on those who have read and remembered the original 
passages, and their better imitations, that this effect 
is produced. To the ignorant and the careless, the 
twentieth imitation has all the charm of an original ; and 

30 that which oppresses the more experienced reader with 
weariness and disgust, rouses them with all the force and 
vivacity of novelty. It is not then, because the orna- 
ments of popular poetry are deficient in intrinsic worth 
and beauty, that they are slighted by the critical reader, 



THE LADY OF TRE LAKE. 43 

but because he at once recognises them to be stolen, and 
perceives that they are arranged without taste or con- 
gruity. In his indignation at the dishonesty, and his 
contempt for the poverty of the collector, he overlooks 
altogether the value of what he has collected, or remem- 5 
bers it only as an aggravation of his offence, — as con- 
verting larceny into sacrilege, and adding the guilt of 
profanation to the folly of unsuitable finery. There are 
other features, no doubt, that distinguish the idols of 
vulgar admiration from the beautiful exemplars of pure 10 
taste ; but this is so much the most characteristic and 
remarkable, that we know no way in which we could so 
shortly describe the poetry that pleases the multitude, 
and displeases the select few, as by saying that it con- 
sisted of all the most known and most brilliant parts of 15 
the most celebrated authors, — of a splendid and unmean- 
ing accumulation of those images and phrases which had 
long charmed every reader in the works of their original 
inventors. 

The justice of these remarks will probably be at once 20 
admitted by all who have attended to the history and 
effects of what may be called Poetical diction in general, 
or even of such particular phrases and epithets as have 
been indebted to their beauty for too great a notoriety. 
Our associations with all this class of expressions, which 25 
have become trite only in consequence of their intrinsic 
excellence, now suggest to us no ideas but those of 
schoolboy imbecility and childish affectation. We look 
upon them merely as the common, hired, and tawdry 
trappings of all who wish to put on, for the hour, the 30 
masquerade habit of poetry; and, instead of receiving 
from them any kind of delight or emotion, do not. even 
distinguish or attend to the signification of the words of 
which they consist. The ear is so palled with their 



44 THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

repetition, and so accustomed to meet with them as the 
habitual expletives of the lowest class of versifiers, that 
they come at last to pass over it without exciting any 
sort of conception whatever, and are not even so much 
5 attended to as to expose their most gross incoherence or 
inconsistency to detection. It is of this quality that 
Swift has availed himself in so remarkable a manner, in 
his famous " Song by a person of quality," which consists 
entirely in a selection of some of the most trite and well- 

lo sounding phrases and epithets in the poetical lexicon of 
the time, strung together without any kind of meaning or 
consistency, and yet so disposed, as to have been perused, 
perhaps by one half of their readers, without any suspi- 
cion of the deception. Most of those phrases, however, 

15 which had thus become sickening, and almost insignificant, 
to the intelligent readers of poetry in the days of Queen 
Anne, are in themselves beautiful and expressive, and, no 
doubt, retain much of their native grace in those ears 
that have not been alienated by their repetition. 

20 But it is not merely from the use of much excellent 
diction, that a modern poet is thus debarred by the 
lavishness of his predecessors. There is a certain range 
of subjects and characters, and a certain manner and 
tone, which were probably, in their origin, as graceful 

25 and attractive, which have been proscribed by the same 
dread of imitation. It would be too long to enter, in this 
place, into any detailed examination of the peculiarities 
— originating chiefly in this source — which distinguish 
ancient from modern poetry. It may be enough just to 

30 remark, that, as the elements of poetical emotion are 
necessarily limited, so it was natural for those who first 
sougl\t to excite it, to avail themselves of those subjects, 
situations, and images, that were most obviously calcu- 
lated to produce that effect ; and to assist them by the 



THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 45 

use of all those aggravating circumstances that most 
readily occurred as likely to heighten their operation. In 
this way, they may be said to have got possession of all 
the choice materials of their art ; and, working without 
fear of comparisons, fell naturally into a free and grace- 5 
ful style of execution, at the same time that the profusion 
of their resources made them somewhat careless and 
inexpert in their application. After-poets were in a very 
different situation. They could neither take the most 
natural and general topics of interest, nor treat them 10 
with the ease and indifference of those who had the whole 
store at their command — because this was precisely what 
had been already done by those who had gone before 
them : And they were therefore put upon various expedi- 
ents for attaining their object, and yet preserving their 15 
claim to originality. Some of them accordingly set them- 
selves to observe and delineate both characters and 
external objects with greater minuteness and fidelity, — 
and others to analyse more carefully the mingling 
passions of the heart, and to feed and cherish a more 20 
limited train of emotion, through a longer and more 
artful succession of incidents, — while a third sort dis- 
torted both nature and passion, according to some fan- 
tastical theory of their own ; or took such a narrow 
corner of each, and dissected it with such curious and 25 
microscopic accuracy, that its original form was no longer 
discernible by the eyes of the uninstructed. In this way 
we think that modern poetry has both been enriched with 
more exquisite pictures and deeper and more sustained 
strains of pathetic, than were known to the less elaborate 3° 
artists of antiquity ; at the same time that it has been 
defaced with more affectation, and loaded with far more 
intricacy. But whether they failed or succeeded, — and 
whether they distinguished themselves from their prede-^ 



46 THK LADY OF THE LAKE. 

cessors by faults or by excellences, the later poets, we 
conceive, must be admitted to have almost always written 
in a more constrained and narrow manner than their 
originals, and to have departed farther from what was 
5 obvious, easy, and natural. Modern poetry, in this 
respect, may be compared, perhaps, without any great 
impropriety, to modern sculpture. It is greatly inferior 
to the ancient in freedom, grace, and simplicity ; but, in 
return, it frequently possesses a more decided expression ; 

10 and more fine finishing of less suitable embellishments. 

Whatever may be gained or lost, however, by this 

change of manner, it is obvious, that poetry must become 

less popular by means of it : For the most natural and 

obvious manner, is always the most taking ; — and what- 

15 ever costs the author much pains and labour, is usually 
found to require a corresponding effort on the part of the 
reader, — which all readers are not disposed to make. 
That they who seek to be original by means of affecta- 
tion, should revolt more by their affectation than they 

20 attract by their originality, is just and natural; but even 
the nobler devices that win the suffrages of the judicious 
by their intrinsic beauty, as well as their novelty, are apt 
to repel the multitude, and to obstruct the popularity of 
some of the most exquisite productions of genius. The 

25 beautiful but minute delineations of such admirable 
observers as Crabbe or Cowper, are apt to appear tedious 
to those who take little interest in their subjects, and 
have no concern about their art ; — and the refined, deep, 
and sustained pathetic of Campbell, is still more apt to 

30 be mistaken for monotony and languor by those who are 
either devoid of sensibility, or impatient of quiet reflec- 
tion. The most popular style undoubtedly is that which 
has great variety and brilliancy, rather than exquisite 
^finish in its images and descriptions ; and which touches 



THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 47 

lightly on many passions, without raising any so high as 
to transcend the comprehension of ordinary mortals — 
or dwelling on it so long as to exhaust their patience. 

Whether Mr. Scott holds the same opinion with us 
upon these matters, and has intentionally conformed his 5 
practice to this theory, — or whether the peculiarities in 
his compositions have been produced merely by following 
out the natural bent of his genius, we do not presume to 
determine : But, that he has actually made use of all our 
recipes for popularity, we think very evident ; and con- 10 
ceive, that few things are more curious than the singular 
skill, or good fortune, with which he has reconciled his 
claims on the favour of the multitude, with his preten- 
sions to more select admiration. Confident in the force 
and originality of his own genius, he has not been afraid 15 
to avail himself of common-places both of diction and of 
sentiment, whenever they appeared to be beautiful or 
impressive, — using them, however, at all times, with the 
skill and spirit of an inventor ; and, quite certain that he 
could not be mistaken for a plagiarist or imitator, he has 20 
made free use of that great treasury of characters, images, 
and expressions, which had been accumulated by the 
most celebrated of his predecessors, — at the same time 
that the rapidity of his transitions, the novelty of his 
combinations, and the spirit and variety of his own 25 
thoughts and inventions, show plainly that he was a 
borrower from anything but poverty, and took only what 
he would have given^ if he had been born in an earlier 
generation. The great secret of his popularity, however, 
and the leading characteristic of his poetry, appear to us 30 
to consist evidently in this, that he has made more use 
of common topics, images, and expressions, than any 
original poet of later times ; and, at the same time, dis- 
played more genius and originality than any recent 



48 THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

author who has worked in the same materials. By the 
latter peculiarity, he has entitled himself to the admira- 
tion of every description of readers; — by the former, he 
is recommended in an especial manner to the inexperi- 
5 enced — at the hazard of some little offence to the more 
cultivated and fastidious. 

In the choice of his subjects, for example, he does 
not attempt to interest merely by fine observations or 
pathetic sentiment, but takes the assistance of a story, 

10 and enlists the reader's curiosity among his motives for 
attention. Then his characters are all selected from the 
most common dramatis persotice of poetry ; — kings, war- 
riors, knights, outlaws, nuns, minstrels, secluded damsels, 
wizards, and true lovers. He never ventures to carry us 

15 into the cottage of the modern peasant, like Crabbe or 
Cowper ; nor into the bosom of domestic privacy, like 
Campbell ; nor among creatures of the imagination, like 
Southey or Darwin. Such personages, we readily admit, 
are not in themselves so interesting or striking as those 

20 to whom Mr. Scott has devoted himself ; but they are 
far less familiar in poetry — and are therefore more likely, 
perhaps, to engage the attention of those to whom poetry 
is familiar. In the management of the passions, again, 
Mr. Scott appears to us to have pursued the same 

25 popular, and comparatively easy course. He has raised 
all the most familiar and poetical emotions, by the most 
obvious aggravations, and in the most compendious and 
judicious ways. He has dazzled the reader with the 
splendour, and even warmed him with the transient heat 

30 of various affections ; but he has nowhere fairly kindled 
him with enthusiasm, or melted him into tenderness. 
Writing for the world at large, he has wisely abstained 
from attempting to raise any passion to a height to which 
worldly people could not be transported ; and contented 



THE LADY O-F THE LAKE. 49 

himself with giving his reader the chance of feeling, as a 
brave, kind, and affectionate gentlemen must often feel 
in the ordinary course of his existence, without trying to 
breathe into him either that lofty enthusiasm which dis- 
dains the ordinary business and amusements of life, or 5 
that quiet and deep sensibility which unfits for most of 
its pursuits. With regard to diction and imagery, too, it 
is quite obvious that Mr. Scott has not aimed at writing 
either in a very pure or a very consistent style. He 
seems to have been anxious only to strike, and to be 10 
easily and universally understood ; and, for this purpose, 
to have culled the most glittering and conspicuous ex- 
pressions of the most popular authors, and to have 
interwoven them in splendid confusion with his own ner- 
vous diction and irregular versification. Indifferent 15 
whether he coins or borrows, and drawing with equal 
freedom on his memory and his imagination, he goes 
boldly forward, in full reliance _ on a never-failing 
abundance ; and dazzles, with his richness and variety, 
even those who are most apt to be offended with his 20 
glare and irregularity. There is nothing, in Mr. Scott, of 
the severe and majestic style of Milton — or of the terse 
and fine composition of Pope — or of the elaborate 
elegance and melody of Campbell — or even of the 
flowing and redundant diction of Southey. — But there is 25 
a medley of bright images and glowing words, set care- 
lessly and loosely together — a diction, tinged succes- 
sively with the careless richness of Shakespeare, the 
harshness and antique simplicity of the old romances, 
the homeliness of vulgar ballads and anecdotes, and 3° 
the sentimental glitter of the most modern poetry, — 
passing from the borders of the ludicrous to those of the 
sublime — alternately minute and energetic — sometimes 
artificial, and frequently negligent — but always full of 



so THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

spirit and vivacity, — abounding in images that are 
striking, at first sight, to minds of every contexture — 
and never expressing a sentiment which it can cost the 
most ordinary reader any exertion to comprehend. 
5 Such seem to be the leading qualities that have con- 
tributed to Mr. Scott's popularity ; and as some of them 
are obviously of a kind to diminish his merit in the eyes 
of more fastidious judges, it is but fair to complete this 
view of his peculiarities by a hasty notice of such of them 

10 as entitle him to unqualified admiration ; — and here it is 
impossible not to be struck with that vivifying spirit of 
strength and animation which pervades all the inequali- 
ties of his composition, and keeps constantly on the mind 
of the reader the impression of great power, spirit and 

15 intrepidity. There is nothing cold, creeping, or feeble, 
in all Mr. Scott's poetry ; — no laborious littleness, or 
puling classical affectation. He has his failures, indeed, 
like other people ; but he always attempts vigorously : 
and never fails in his immediate object, without accom- 

20 plishing something far beyond the reach of an ordinary 
writer. Even when he wanders from the paths of pure 
taste, he leaves behind him the footsteps of a powerful 
genius ; and moulds the most humble of his materials 
into a form worthy of a nobler substance. Allied to this 

25 inherent vigour and animation, and in a great degree 
derived from it, is that air of facility and freedom which 
adds so peculiar a grace to most of Mr. Scott's compo- 
sitions. There is certainly no living poet whose works 
seem to come from him with so much ease, or who so 

30 seldom appears to labour, even in the most burdensome 
parts of his performance. He seems, indeed, never to 
think either of himself or his reader, but to be completely 
identified and lost in the personages with whom he is 
occupied ; and the attention of the reader is consequently 



THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 51 

either transferred, unbroken, to their adventures, or^ if it 
glance back for a moment to the author, it is only to 
think how much more might be done, by putting forth 
that strength at full, which has, without effort, accom- 
plished so many wonders. It is owing partly to these 5 
qualities, and partly to the great variety of his style, that 
Mr. Scott is much less frequently tedious than any other 
bulky poet with whom we are acquainted. His store of 
images is so copious, that he never dwells upon one long 
enough to produce weariness in the reader ; and, even 10 
where he deals in borrowed or in tawdry wares, the 
rapidity of his transitions, and the transient glance with 
which he is satisfied as to each, leave the critic no time 
to be offended, ^nd hurry him forward, along with the 
multitude, enchanted with the brilliancy of the exhibition. 15 
Thus, the very frequency of his deviations from pure 
taste, comes, in some sort, to constitute their apology ; 
and the profusion and variety of his faults to afford a 
new proof of his genius. 

These, we think, are the general characteristics of Mr. 20 
Scott's poetry. Among his minor peculiarities, we might 
notice his singular talent for description, and especially 
for the description of scenes abounding in motion or 
actiofi of any kind. In this department, indeed, we con- 
ceive him to be almost without a rival, either among 25 
modern or ancient poets ; and the character and process 
of his descriptions are as extraordinary as their effect is 
astonishing. He places before the eyes of his readers a 
more distinct and complete picture, perhaps, than any 
other artist ever presented by mere words ; and yet he 3° 
does not (like Crabbe) enumerate all the visible parts of 
the subjects with any degree of minuteness, nor confine 
himself, by any means, to what is visible. The singular 
merit of his delineations, on the contrary, consists in 



52 THE LADY OF THE LAKE. 

this, ihat, with a few bold and abrupt strokes, he finishes 
a most spirited outHne, — and then instantly kindles it 
by the sudden light and colour of some moral affection. 
There are none of his fine descriptions, accordingly, 

5 which do not derive a great part of their clearness and 
picturesque effect, as well as their interest, from the 
quantity of character and moral expression which is thus 
blended with their details, and which, so far from inter- 
rupting the conception of the external object, very power- 

lo fully stimulate the fancy of the reader to complete it ; 
and give a grace and a spirit to the whole representation, 
of which we do not know where to look for any other 
example. 

Another very striking peculiarity in Mr. Scott's poetry, 

15 is the air of freedom and nature which he has contrived 
to impart to most of his distinguished characters ; and 
with which no poet more modern than Shakespeare has 
ventured to represent personages of such dignity. We 
do not allude here merely to the genuine familiarity and 

20 homeliness of many of his scenes and dialogues, but to 
that air of gaiety and playfulness in which persons of 
high rank seem, from time immemorial, to have thought 
it necessary to array, not their courtesy only, but their 
generosity and their hostility. This tone of good society, 

25 Mr. Scott has shed over his higher characters with great 
grace and effect ; and has, in this way, not only made his 
representations much more faithful and true to nature, 
but has very agreeably relieved the monotony of that 
tragic solemnity which ordinary writers appear to think 

30 indispensable to the dignity of poetical heroes and 
heroines. We are not sure, however, whether he has not 
occasionally exceeded a little in the use of this ornament ; 
and given, now and then, too coquettish and trifling a 
tone to discussions of weight and moment, 



POEMS. 



By the Reverend George Crabbe. 8vo, pp. 260. London, ISC']?- 



We receive the proofs of Mr. Crabbe's poetical exist- 
ence, which are contained in this volume, with the same 
sort of feeling that would be excited by tidings of an 
ancient friend, whom we no longer expected to hear of in 
this world. We rejoice in his resurrection, both for his 
sake and for our own : But we feel also, a certain move- 
ment of self-condemnation, for having been remiss in our 
inquiries after him, and somewhat too negligent of the 
honours which ought, at any rate, to have been paid to 
his memory. 

1 I have given a larger space to Crabbe in this republication than 
to any of his contemporary poets ; not merely because I think more 
highly of him than of n\pst of them, but also because I fancy that 
he has had less justice done him. The nature of his subjects was 
not such as to attract either imitators or admirers, from among the 
ambitious or fanciful lovers of poetry ; or, consequently, to set him 
at the head of a School, or let him surround himself with the 
zealots of a Sect : And it must also be admitted, that his claims to 
distinction depend fully as much on his great powers of observation, 
his skill in touching the deeper sympathies of our nature, and his 
power of inculcating, by their means, the most impressive lessons of 
humanity, as on any fine play of fancy, or grace and beauty in his 
delineations. I have great faith, however, in the intrinsic worth and 
ultimate success of those more substantial attributes ; and have, 
accordingly, the strongest impression that the citations I have here 
given from Crabbe will strike more, and sink deeper into the minds 
of readers to whom they are new (or by whom they may have been 
partially forgotten), than any I have been able to present from other 



54 CRABBKS POEMS. 

It is now, we are afraid, upwards of twenty years since 
we were first struck with the vigour, originahty, and truth 
of description of ''The Village"; and since, we regretted 
that an author, who could write so well, should have 
5 written so little. From that time to the present, we have 
heard little of Mr. Crabbe ; and fear that he has been in 
a great measure lost sight of by the public, as well as by 
us. With a singular, and scarcely pardonable indifference 
to fame, he has remained, during this long interval, in 

10 patient or indolent repose ; and, without making a single 
movement to maintain or advance the reputation he had 
acquired, has permitted others to usurp the attention 
which he was sure of commanding, and allowed himself 
to be nearly forgotten by a public, which reckons upon 

15 being reminded of all the claims which the living have 
on its favour. His former publications, though of dis- 
tinguished merit, were perhaps too small in volume to 
remain long the objects of general attention, and seem, 
by some accident, to have been jostled aside in the 

20 crowd of more clamorous competitors. 

Yet, though the name of Crabbe has not hitherto been 
very common in the mouths of our poetical critics, we 
believe there are few real lovers of poetry to whom some 
of his sentiments and descriptions are not secretly 

writers. It probably is idle enough (as well as a little presumptuous) 
to suppose that a publication like this will afford many opportunities 
of testing the truth of this prediction. But, as the experiment is to 
be made, there can be no harm in mentioning this as one of its 
objects. 

It is but candid, however, after all, to add, that my concern for 
Mr. Crabbe's reputation would scarcely have led me to devote near 
one hundred pages to the estimate of his poetical merits, had I not 
set some value on the speculations as to the elements of poetical 
excellence in general, and its moral bearings and afifinities — for the 
introduction of which this estimate seemed to present an occasion, 
or apology. 



GRABBERS POEMS. 55 

familiar. There is a truth and force in many of his 
deUneations of rustic life, which is calculated to sink 
deep into the memory ; and, being confirmed by daily 
observation, they are recalled upon innumerable occa- 
sions — when the ideal pictures of more fanciful authors 5 
have lost all their interest. For ourselves at least, we 
profess to be indebted to Mr. Crabbe for many of these 
strong impressions ; and have known more than one of 
our unpoetical acquaintances, who declared they could 
never pass by a parish workhouse without thinking of the 10 
description of it they had read at school in the Poetical 
Extracts. The volume before us will renew, we trust, 
and extend many such impressions. It contains aTl the 
former productions of the author, with about double their 
bulk of new matter; most of it in the same taste and 15 
manner of composition with the former ; and some of a 
kind, of which we have had no previous example in this 
author. The whole, however, is of no ordinary merit, 
and will be found, we have little doubt, a sufficient 
warrant for Mr. Crabbe to take his place as one of the 20 
most original, nervous, and pathetic poets of the present 
century. 

His characteristic, certainly, is force, and truth of 
description, joined for the most part to great selection 
and condensation of expression ; — that kind of strength 25 
and originality which we meet with in Cowper, and that 
sort of diction and versification which we admire in 
"The Deserted Village" of Goldsmith, or "The Vanity 
of Human Wishes" of Johnson. If he can be said to 
have imitated the manner of any author, it is Goldsmith, 30 
indeed, who has been the object of his imitation ; and 
yet his general train of thinking, and his views of society, 
are so extremely opposite, that, when " The Village " was 
first published, it was commonly considered as an anti- 



56 CR ABBE'S POEMS. 

dote or an answer to the more captivating representations 
of "The Deserted Village." Compared with this cele- 
brated author, he will be found, we think, to have more 
vigour and less delicacy ; and while he must be admitted 
5 to be inferior in the fine finish and uniform beauty of his 
composition, we cannot help considering him superior, 
both in the variety and the truth of his pictures. Instead 
of that uniform tint of pensive tenderness which over- 
spreads the whole poetry of Goldsmith, we' find in Mr. 

10 Crabbe many gleams of gaiety and humour. Though 
his habitual views of life are more gloomy than those of 
his rival, his poetical temperament seems far more cheer- 
ful ; and when the occasions of sorrow and rebuke are 
gone by, he can collect himself for sarcastic pleasantry, 

15 or unbend in innocent playfulness. His diction, though 
generally pure and powerful, is sometimes harsh, and 
sometimes quaint ; and he has occasionally admitted a 
couplet or two in a state so unfinished, as to give a char- 
acter of inelegance to the passages in which they occur. 

20 With a taste less disciplined and less fastidious than that 
of Goldsmith, he has, in our apprehension, a keener eye 
for observation, and a readier hand for the delineation of 
what he has observed. There is less poetical keeping in 
his whole performance ; but the groups of which it con- 

25 sists are conceived, we think, with equal genius, and 
drawn with greater spirit as well as far greater fidelity. 

It is not quite fair, perhaps, thus to draw a detailed 
parallel between a living poet, and one whose reputation 
has been sealed by death, and by the immutable sentence 

30 of a surviving generation. Yet there are so few of his 
contemporaries to whom Mr. Crabbe bears any resem- 
blance, that we can scarcely explain our opinion of his 
merit, without comparing him to some of his predecessors. 
There is one set of writers, indeed, from whose works 



CRABBE'S POEMS. 57 

those of Mr. Crabbe might receive all that elucidation 
which results from contrast, and from an entire opposition 
in all points of taste and opinion. We allude now to the 
Wordsworths, and the Southeys, and Coleridges, and all 
that ambitious fraternity, that, with good intentions and s 
extraordinary talents, are labouring to bring back our 
poetry to the fantastical oddity and puling childishness of 
Withers, Quarles, or Marvel. These gentlemen write a 
great deal about rustic life, as well as Mr. Crabbe ; and 
they even agree with him in dwelling much on its dis- lo 
comforts ; but nothing can be more opposite than the 
views they take of the subject, or the manner in which 
they execute their representations of them. 

Mr. Crabbe exhibits the common people of England 
pretty much as they are, and as they must appear to 15 
every one who will take the trouble of examining into 
their condition ; at the same time that he renders his 
sketches in a very high degree interesting and beautiful 
— by selecting what is most fit for description — by 
grouping them into such forms as must catch the attention 20 
or awake the memory — and by scattering over the whole 
such traits of moral sensibility, of sarcasm, and of deep 
reflection, as every one must feel to be natural, and own 
to be powerful. The gentlemen of the new school, on 
the other hand, scarcely ever condescend to take their 25 
subjects from any description of persons at all known to 
the common inhabitants of the world ; but invent for 
themselves certain whimsical and unheard-of beings, to 
whom they impute some fantastical combination of feel- 
ings, and then labour to excite our sympathy for them, 30 
either by placing them in incredible situations, or by 
some strained and exaggerated moralisation of a vague 
and tragical description. Mr. Crabbe, in short, shows us 
something which we have all seen, or may see, in real life; 



58 CR ABBE'S POEMS. 

and draws from it such feelings and such reflections as 
every human being must acknowledge that it is calculated 
to excite. He delights us by the truth, and vivid and 
picturesque beauty of his representations, and by the 
5 force and pathos of the sensations with which we feel that 
they are connected. Mr. Wordsworth and his associates, 
on the other hand, introduce us to beings whose existence 
was not previously suspected by the acutest observers of 
nature ; and excite an interest for them — where they do 

10 excite any interest — more by an eloquent and refined 
analysis of their own capricious feelings, than by any ob- 
vious or intelligible ground of sympathy in their situation. 
Those who are acquainted with the Lyrical Ballads, or 
the more recent publications of Mr. Wordsworth, will 

15 scarcely deny the justice of this representation ; but in 
order to vindicate it to such as do not enjoy that advan- 
tage, we must beg leave to make a few hasty references 
to the former, and by far the least exceptionable of those 
productions. 

20 A village schoolmaster, for instance, is a pretty common 
poetical character. Goldsmith has drawn him inimitably; 
so has Shenstone, with the slight change of sex; and Mr. 
Crabbe, in two passages, has followed their footsteps. 
Now, Mr. Wordsworth has a village schoolmaster also — 

25 a personage who makes no small figure in three or four of 
his poems. But by what traits is this worthy old gentle- 
man delineated by the new poet? No pedantry — no 
innocent vanity of learning — no mixture of indulgence 
with the pride of power, and of poverty with the conscious- 

30 ness of rare acquirements. Every feature which belongs 
to the situation, or marks the character in common appre- 
hension, is scornfully discarded by Mr. Wordsworth; who 
represents his grey-haired rustic pedagogue as a sort of 
half crazy, sentimental person, overrun with fine feelings, 



CB ABBE'S POEMS. 59 

constitutional merriment, and a most humorous melan- 
choly. Here are the two stanzas in which this consistent 
and intelligible character is pourtrayed. The diction is 
at least as new as the conception. 

** The sighs which Matthew heav'd were sighs 5 

Of one tir'd out with///« and madness ; 
The tears which came to Matthew's eyes 
Were tears of light — the oil of gladness. 

" Yet sometimes, when the secret cup 

Of still and serious thought went round lo 

He seem'd as if he drank it zip. 

He felt with spirit so profound. 
Thou soul of God's best earthly mould'"' &c. 

A frail damsel again is a character common enough in 
all poems ; and one upon which many fine and pathetic 15 
lines have been expended. Mr. Wordsworth has written 
more than three hundred on the subject ; but, instead of 
new images of tenderness, or delicate representation of 
intelligible feelings, he has contrived to tell us nothing 
whatever of the unfortunate fair one, but that her name 20 
is Martha Ray; and that she goes up to the top of a hill, 
in a red cloak, and cries " O misery! " All the rest of 
the poem is filled with a description of an old thorn and 
a pond, and of the silly stories which the neighbouring 
old women told about them. 25 

The sports of childhood, and the untimely death of 
promising youth, is also a common topic of poetry. Mr. 
Wordsworth has made some blank verse about it ; but, 
instead of the delightful and picturesque sketches with 
which so many authors of modern talents have presented 3° 
us on this inviting subject, all that he is pleased to com- 
municate of his rustic child, is, that he used to amuse 
himself with shouting to the owls, and hearing them 
answer. To make amends for this brevity, the process 
of his mimicry is most accurately described. 35 



6o CRABBERS POEMS. 

. " With fingers interwoven, both hands 

Press'd closely palm to palm, and to his mouth 
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument. 
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, 
5 That they might answer him." — 

This is all we hear of him ; and for the sake of this 
one accomplishment, we are told, that the author has 
frequently stood mute, and gazed on his grave for half an 
hour together! 

10 Love, and the fantasies of lovers, have afforded an 
ample theme to poets of all ages. Mr. Wordsworth, how- 
ever, has thought fit to compose a piece, illustrating this 
copious subject by one single thought. A lover trots 
away to see his mistress one fine evening, gazing all the 

15 way on the moon ; when he comes to her door, 

" O mercy! to myself I cried, 
If Lucy should be dead! " 

And there the poem ends! 

Now, we leave it to any reader of common candour 

20 and discernment to say, whether these representations of 
character and sentiment are drawn from that eternal and 
universal standard of truth and nature, which every one 
is knowing enough to recognise, and no one great enough 
to depart from with impunity; or whether they are not 

25 formed, as we have ventured to allege, upon certain fan- 
tastic and affected peculiarities in the mind or fancy of 
the author, into which it is most improbable that many of 
his readers will enter, and which cannot, in some cases, 
be comprehended without much effort and explanation. 

30 Instead of multiplying instances of these wide and wilful 
aberrations from ordinary nature, it may be more satis- 
factory to produce the author's own admission of the 
narrowness of the plan upon which he writes, and of the 
very extraordinary circumstances which he himself some- 

35 times thinks it necessary for his readers to keep in view, 



CRABBERS POEMS. 6i 

if they would wish to understand the beauty or propriety 
of his delineations. 

A pathetic tale of guilt or superstition may be told, we 
are apt to fancy, by the poet himself, in his general 
character of poet, with full as much effect as by any other 5 
person. An old nurse, at any rate, or a monk or parish 
clerk, is always at hand to give grace to such a narration. 
None of these, however, would satisfy Mr. Wordsworth. 
He has written a long poem of this sort, in which he 
thinks it indispensably necessary to apprise the reader, 10 
that he has endeavoured to represent the language and 
sentiments of a particular character — of which character, 
he adds, " the reader will have a general notion, if he has 
ever known a man, a captain of a small trading vessel^ for 
example, who h€\ngpast the middle age of life, has retired 15 
upon an annuity, or sfnall i?idepe7ide7it inco77ie, to some 
village or country, of which he was 7iot a 7iative, or in 
which he had not been accustomed to live! " 

Now, we must be permitted to doubt, whether, among 
all the readers of Mr. Wordsworth (few or many), there 20 
is a single individual who has had the happiness of know- 
ing a person of this very peculiar description ; or who is 
capable of forming any sort of conjecture of the particular 
disposition and turn of thinking which such a combination 
of attributes would be apt to produce. To us, we will 25 
confess, the a7i7io7ice appears as ludicrous and absurd as 
it would be in the author of an ode or an epic to say, 
" Of this piece the reader will necessarily form a very 
erroneous judgment, unless he is apprised, that it was 
written by a pale man in a green coat — sitting cross- 30 
legged on an oaken stool — with a scratch on his nose, 
and a spelling dictionary on the table." -^ 

1 Some of our readers may have a curiosity to know in what 
manner this old annuitant captain does actually express himself in 



62 CR ABBE'S POEMS. 

From these childish and absurd affectations, we turn 
with pleasure to the manly sense and correct picturing of 
Mr. Crabbe ; and, after being dazzled and made giddy 
with the elaborate raptures and obscure originalities of 
5 these new artists, it is refreshing to meet again with the 
spirit and nature of our old masters, in the nervous pages 
of the author now before us. 

the village of his adoption. For their gratification, we annex the 
two first stanzas of his story ; in which, with all the attention we 
have been able to bestow, we have been utterly unable to detect 
any traits that can be supposed to characterise either a seaman, an 
annuitant, or a stranger in a country town. It is a style, on the 
contrary, which we should ascribe, without hesitation, to a certain 
poetical fraternity in the West of England ; and which, we verily 
believe, never was, and never will be, used by any one out of that 
fraternity. 

" There is a thorn — it looks so old, 

In truth you "d find it hard to say, 
How it could ever have been young ! 

It looks so old and gray. 
Not higher than a two-years' child 

// stands erect ; this aged thorn ! 
No leaves it has, no thorny points ; 
It is a mass of knotted joints : 

A wretched thing forlorn, 
It stands erect ; and like a stone, 
With lichens it is overgrown. 

" Like rock or stone, it is o''ergrown 

With lichens ; — to the very top ; 
And hung with heavy tufts of moss 

A melancholy crop. 
Up from the earth these mosses creep, 

And this poor thorn, they clasp it round 
So close, you'd say that they were bent, 
With plain and manifest intent I 

To drag it to the ground ; 
And all had join'd in one endeavour. 
To bury this poor thorn for ever." 

And this it seems, is Nature, and Pathos, and Poetry ! 



THE BOROUGH. 



A Poem, in Ttventy-foiir Letters. By the Rev. George Crabbe, LL.B. 
8vo, pp. J44. London, 1810. 



We are very glad to meet with Mr. Crabbe so soon 
again ; and particularly glad to find, that his early return 
has been occasioned, in part, by the encouragement he 
received on his last appearance. This late spring of 
public favour, we hope, he will live to see ripen into 
mature fame. We scarcely know any poet who deserves 
it better ; and are quite certain there is none who is more 
secure of keeping with posterity whatever he may win 
from his contemporaries. 

The present poem is precisely of the character of The 
Village and The Parish Register. It has the same 
peculiarities, and the same faults and beauties ; though a 
severe critic might perhaps add, that its peculiarities are 
more obtrusive, its faults greater, and its beauties less. 
However that be, both faults and beauties are so plainly 
produced by the peculiarity, that it may be worth while, 
before giving any more particular account of it, to try if 
we can ascertain in what that consists. 

And here we shall very speedily discover, that Mr. 
Crabbe is distinguished from all other poets, both by the 
choice of his subjects, and by his manner of treating 
them. All his persons are taken from the lower ranks of 
life ; and all his scenery from the most ordinary and 
familiar objects of nature or art. His characters and 
incidents, too, are as common as the elernents out of 



64 THE BOROUGH. 

which they are compounded are humble ; and not only 
has he nothing prodigious or astonishing in any of his 
representations, but he has not even attempted to impart 
any of the ordinary colours of poetry to those vulgar 

5 materials. He has no moralising swains or sentimental 
tradesmen ; and scarcely ever seeks to charm us by the 
artless graces or lowly virtues of his personages. On the 
contrary, he has represented his villagers and humble 
burghers as altogether as dissipated, and more dishonest 

lo and discontented, than the profligates of higher life ; and, 
instead of conducting us through blooming groves and 
pastoral meadows, has led us along filthy lanes and 
crowded wharves, to hospitals, alms-houses, and gin- 
shops. In some of these delineations, he may be con- 

15 sidered the Satirist of low life — an occupation sufficiently 
arduous, and, in a great degree, new and original in our 
language. But by far the greater part of his poetry is of 
a different and a higher character ; and aims at moving 
or delighting us by lively, touching, and finely contrasted 

20 representations of the dispositions, sufferings, and occu- 
pations of those ordinary persons who form the far 
greater part of our fellow-creatures. This, too, he has 
sought to effect, merely by placing before us the clearest, 
most brief, and most striking sketches of their external 

25 condition — the most sagacious and unexpected strokes 
of character — and the truest and most pathetic pictures 
of natural feeling and common suffering. By the mere 
force of his art, and the novelty of his style, he forces us 
to attend to objects that are usually neglected, and to 

30 enter into feelings from which we are in general but too 
eager to escape ; — and then trusts to nature for the 
effect of the representation. 

It is obvious, at first sight, that this is not a task for 
an ordinary hand ; and that many ingenious writers, who 



THE BOROUGH. 65 

make a very good figure with battles, nymphs, and moon- 
light landscapes, would find themselves quite helpless, if 
set down among streets, harbours, and taverns. The 
difficulty of such subjects, in short, is sufficiently visible 
— and some of the causes of that difficulty : But they 5 
have their advantages also ; — and Of these, and their 
hazards, it seems natural to say a few words, before 
entering more minutely into the merits of the work 
before us. 

The first great advantage of such familiar subjects is, 10 
that every one is necessarily well acquainted with the 
originals ; and is therefore sure to feel all that pleasure, 
from a faithful representation of them, which results from 
the perception of a perfect and successful imitation. In 
the kindred art of painting, we find that this single con- 15 
sideration has been sufficient to stamp a very high value 
upon accurate and lively delineations of objects, in them- 
selves uninteresting, and even disagreeable ; and no very 
inconsiderable part of the pleasure which may be derived 
from Mr. Crabbe's poetry may probably be referred to 20 
its mere truth and fidelity ; and to the brevity and clear- 
ness with which he sets before his readers, objects and 
characters with which they have been all their days 
familiar. 

In his happier passages, however, he has a higher 25 
merit, and imparts a far higher gratification. The chief 
delight of poetry consists, not so much in what it directly 
supplies to the imagination, as in what it enables it to 
supply to itself ; — not in warming the heart by its pass- 
ing brightness, but in kindling its own latent stores of 30 
light and heat ; — not in hurrying the fancy along by a 
foreign and accidental impulse, but in setting it agoing, 
by touching its internal springs and principles of activity. 
Now, this highest and most delightful effect can only be 



66 THE BOROUGH. 

produced by the poet's striking a note to which the heart 
and the affections naturally vibrate in unison ; — by rous- 
ing one of a large family of kindred impressions ; — by 
dropping the rich seed of his fancy upon the fertile and 

5 sheltered places of the imagination. But it is evident, 
that the emotions connected with common and familiar 
objects — with objects which fill every man's memory, 
and are necessarily associated with all that he has ever 
really felt or fancied, are of all others the most likely to 

lo answer this description, and to produce, where they can 
be raised to a sufficient height, this great effect in its 
utmost perfection. It is for this reason that the images 
and affections that belong to our universal nature, are 
always, if tolerably represented, infinitely more captivat- 

15 ing, in spite of their apparent commonness and simplicity, 
than those that are peculiar to certain situations, however 
they may come recommended by novelty or grandeur. 
The familiar feeling of maternal tenderness and anxiety, 
which is every day before our eyes, even in the brute 

20 creation — and the enchantment of youthful love, which 
is nearly the same in all characters, ranks, and situations 
— still contribute far more to the beauty and interest of 
poetry than all the misfortunes of princes, the jealousies 
of heroes, and the feats of giants, magicians, or ladies 

25 in armour. Every one can enter into the former set of 
feelings ; and but a few into the latter. The one calls 
up a thousand familiar and long-remembered emotions — 
which are answered and reflected on every side by the 
kindred impressions which experience or observation 

30 have traced upon every memory: while the other lights up 
but a transient and unfruitful blaze, and passes away with- 
out perpetuating itself in kny kindred and native sensation. 
Now, the delineation of all that concerns the lower 
and most numerous classes of society, is, in this respect, 



THE BOROUGH, 67 

on a footing with the pictures of our primary affections 

— that their originals are necessarily familiar to all men, 
and are inseparably associated with their own most inter- 
esting impressions. Whatever may be our own condition, 
we all live surrounded with the poor, from infancy to 5 
age ; — we hear daily of their sufferings and misfortunes ; 

— and their toils, their crimes, or their pastimes, are our 
hourly spectacle. Many diligent readers of poetry know 
little, by their own experience, of palaces, castles, or 
camps ; and still less of tyrants, warriors and banditti ; 10 
but every one understands about cottages, streets, and 
villages ; and conceives, pretty correctly, the character 
and condition of sailors, ploughmen, and artificers. If 
the poet can contrive, therefore, to create a sufficient 
interest in subjects like these, they will infallibly sink 15 
deeper into the mind, and be more prolific of kindred 
trains of emotion, than subjects of greater dignity. Nor 

is the difficulty of exciting such an interest by any means 
so great as is generally imagined. For it is common 
human nature, and common human feelings, after all, 20 
that form the true source of interest in poetry of every 
description ; — and the splendour and the marvels by 
which it is sometimes surrounded, serve no other purpose 
than to fix our attention on those workings of the heart, 
and those energies of the understanding, which alone 25 
command all the genuine sympathies of human beings — 
and which may be found as abundantly in the breasts of 
cottagers as of kings. Wherever there are human beings, 
therefore, with feelings and characters to be represented, 
our attention may be fixed by the art of the poet ^5— by 30 
his judicious selection of circumstances — by the force 
and vivacity of his style, and the clearness and brevity of 
his representations. 

In point of fact, we are all touched more deeply, as 



68 THE BOROUGH. 

well as more frequently, in real life, with the sufferings of 
peasants than of princes ; and sympathise much oftener, 
and more heartily, with the successes of the poor, than of 
the rich and distinguished. The occasions of such feel- 
5 ings are indeed so many, and so common, that they do 
not often leave any very permanent traces behind them, 
but pass away, and are effaced by the very rapidity of 
their succession. The business and the cares, and the 
pride of the world, obstruct the development of the 

10 emotions to which they would naturally give rise ; and 
press so close and thick^ upon the mind, as to shut it, at 
most seasons, against the reflections that are perpetually 
seeking for admission. When we have leisure, however, 
to look quietly into our hearts, we shall find in them an 

15 infinite multitude of little fragments of sympathy with our 
brethren in humble life — abortive movements of com- 
passion, and embryos of kindness and concern, which 
had once fairly begun to live and germinate within them, 
though withered and broken off by the selfish bustle and 

20 fever of our daily occupations. Now, all these may be 
revived and carried on to maturity by the art of the poet ; 
— and, therefore, a powerful effort to interest us in the 
feelings of the humble and obscure, will usually call forth 
more deep, more numerous, and more permanent emo- 

25 tions, than can ever be excited by the fate of princesses 
and heroes. Independent of the circumstances to which 
we have already alluded, there are causes which make us 
at all times more ready to enter into the feelings of the 
humble, than of the exalted part of our species. Our 

30 sympathy with their enjoyments is enhanced by a certain 
mixture of pity for their general condition, which, by 
purifying it from that taint of envy which almost always 
adheres to our admiration of the great, renders it more 
welcome and satisfactory to our bosoms ; while our con- 



THE BOROUGH. 69 

cern for their sufferings is at once softened and endeared 
to us, by the recollection of our own exemption from 
them, and by the feeling, that we frequently have it in 
our power to relieve them. 

From these, and from other causes, it appears to us to 5 
be certain, that where subjects, taken from humble life, 
can be made sufficiently interesting to overcome the 
distaste and the prejudices with which the usages of 
polished society too generally lead us to regard them, 
the interest which they excite will commonly be more 10 
profound and more lasting than any that can be raised 
upon loftier themes ; and the poet of the Village and the 
Borough be oftener, and longer read, than the poet of 
the Court or the Camp. The most popular passages of 
Shakespeare and Cowper, we think, are of this description: 15 
and there is much, both in the volume before us, and in 
Mr. Crabbe's former publications, to which we might 
now venture to refer, as proofs of the same doctrine. 
When such representations have once made an impres- 
sion on the imagination, they are remembered daily, and 20 
for ever. We can neither look around, nor within us, 
without being reminded of their truth and their import- 
ance ; and, while the more brilliant effusions of romantic 
fancy are recalled only at long intervals, and in rare 
situations, we feel that we cannot walk a step from our 25 
own doors, nor cast a glance back on our departed years, 
without being indebted to the poet of vulgar life for some 
striking image or touching, reflection, of which the occa- 
sions were always before us, but — till he taught us how 
to improve them — were almost always allowed to escape. 30 

Such, we conceive, are some of the advantages of the 
subjects which Mr. Crabbe has in a great measure intro- 
duced into modern poetry; — and such the grounds upon 
which we venture to perdict the durability of the reputa- 



70 THE BOROUGH. 

tion which he is in the course of acquiring. That they 
have their disadvantages also, is obvious ; and it is no 
less obvious, that it is to these we must ascribe the 
greater part of the faults and deformities with which this 
5 author is fairly chargeable. The two great errors into 
which he has fallen, are — that he has described many 
things not worth describing ; — and that he has frequently 
excited disgust, instead of pity or indignation, in the 
breasts of his readers. These faults are obvious — and, 

10 we believe, are popularly laid to his charge : Yet there is, 
in so far as we have observed, a degree of misconception 
as to the true grounds and limits of the charge, which 
we think it worth while to take this opportunity of cor- 
recting. 

15 The poet of humble life must describe a great deal — 
and must even describe, minutely, many things which 
possess in themselves no beauty or grandeur. The 
reader's fancy must be awaked — and the power of his 
own pencil displayed ; — a distinct locality and imaginary 

20 reality must be given to his characters and agents : and 
the ground colour of their common condition must be 
laid in, before his peculiar and selected groups can be 
presented with any effect or advantage. In the same 
way, he must study characters with a minute and ana- 

25 tomical precision ; and must make both himself and his 
readers familiar with the ordinary traits and general 
family features of the beings among whom they are to 
move, before they can either understand, or take much 
interest in the individuals who are to engross their atten- 

30 tion. Thus far, there is no excess or unnecessary minute- 
ness. But this faculty of observation, and this power of 
description, hold out great temptations to go further. 
There is a pride and a delight in the exercise of all 
peculiar power ; and the poet, who has learned to de- 



THE BOROUGH. ) i 

scribe external objects exquisitely, with a view to heighten 
the effect of his moral designs, and to draw characters 
with accuracy, to help forward the interest or the pathos 
of the picture, will be in great danger of describing 
scenes, and drawing characters, for no other purpose, but 5 
to indulge his taste, and to display his talents. It cannot 
be denied, we think, that Mr. Crabbe has, on many 
occasions, yielded to this temptation. He is led away, 
every now and then, by his lively conception of external 
objects, and by his nice and sagacious observation of 10 
human character ; and wantons and luxuriates in descrip- 
tions and moral portrait painting, while his readers are 
left to wonder to what end so much industry has been 
exerted. 

His chief fault, however, is his frequent lapse into 15 
disgusting representations ; and this, we will confess, is 
an error for which we find it far more difficult either to 
account or to apologise. We are not, however, of the 
opinion which we have often heard stated, that he has 
represented human nature under too unfavourable an 20 
aspect ; or that the distaste which his poetry sometimes 
produces, is owing merely to the painful nature of the 
scenes and subjects with which it abounds. On the 
contrary, we think he has given a juster, as well as a 
more striking picture, of the true character and situation 2 5 
of the lower orders of this country, than any other writer, 
whether in verse or in prose ; and that he has made no 
more use of painful emotions than was necessary to the 
production of a pathetic effect. 

All powerful and pathetic poetry, it is obvious, abounds 3° 
in images of distress. The delight which it bestows 
partakes strongly of pain ; and, by a sort of contradic- 
tion, which has long engaged the attention of the reflect- 
ing, the compositions that attract us most powerfully, 



72 THE BOROUGH. 

and detain us the longest, are those that produce in us 
most of the effects of actual suffering and wretchedness. 
The solution of this paradox is to be found, we think, in 
the simple fact, that pain is a far stronger sensation than 
5 pleasure, in human existence ; and that the cardinal 
virtue of all things that are intended to delight the mind, 
is to produce a strong sensation. Life itself appears to 
consist in sensation ; and the universal passion of all 
beings that have life, seems to be, that they should be 

10 made intensely conscious of it, by a succession of power- 
ful and engrossing emotions. All the mere gratifications 
or natural pleasures that are in the power even of the 
most fortunate, are quite insufficient to fill this vast 
craving for sensation : And accordingly, we see every 

15 day, that a more violent stimulus is sought for by those 
who have attained the vulgar heights of life, in the 
pains and dangers of war — the agonies of gaming — or 
the feverish toils of ambition. To those who have tasted 
of those potent cups, where the bitter, however, so 

20 obviously predominates, the security, the comforts, and 
what are called the enjoyments of common life, are 
intolerably insipid and disgusting. Nay, we think we 
have observed, that even those who, without any effort or 
exertion, have experienced unusual misery, frequently 

25 appear, in like manner, to acquire a sort of taste or 
craving for it ; and come to look on the tranquillity of 
ordinary life with a kind of indifference not unmingled 
with contempt. It is certain, at least, that they dwell 
with most apparent satisfaction on the memory of those 

30 days, which have been marked by the deepest and most 
agonising sorrows ; and derive a certain delight from the 
recollections of those overwhelming sensations which 
once occasioned so fierce a throb in the languishing pulse 
of their existence. 



THE BOROUGH. 73 

If any thing of this kind, however, can be traced in 
real life — if the passion for emotion be so strong as to 
carry us, not in imagination, but in reality, over the rough 
edge of present pain — it will not be difficult to explain, 
why it should be so attractive in the copies and fictions 5 
of poetry. There, as in real life, the great demand is for 
emotion ;. while the pain with which it may be attended, 
can scarcely, by any possibility, exceed the limits of 
endurance. The recollection, that it is but a copy and 
a fiction, is quite sufficient to keep it down to a moderate 10 
temperature, and to make it welcome as the sign or 
the harbinger of that agitation of which the soul is 
avaricious. It is not, then, from any peculiar quality in 
painful emotions that they become capable of affording 
the delight which attends them in tragic or pathetic poetry 15 
— but merely from the circumstance of their being more 
intense and powerful than any other emotions of which 
the mind is susceptible. If it was the constitution of our 
nature to feel joy as keenly, or to sympathise with it as 
heartily as we do with sorrow, we have no doubt that no 20 
other sensation would ever be intentionally excited by 
the artists that minister to delight. But the fact is, that 
the pleasures of which we are capable are slight and feeble 
compared with the pains that we may endure ; and that, 
feeble as they are, the sympathy which they excite falls 25 
much more short of the original emotion. When the 
object, therefore, is to obtain sensation, there can be 
no doubt to which of the two fountains we should 
repair ; and if there be but few pains in real life which 
are not, in some measure, endeared to us by the emotions 3° 
with which they are attended, we may be pretty sure, that 
the more distress we introduce into poetry, the more we 
shall rivet the attention and attract the admiration of the 
reader. 



74 THE BOROUGH. 

There is but one exception to this rule — and it brings 
us back from the apology of Mr. Crabbe, to his condem- 
nation. Every form of distress, whether it proceed from 
passion or from fortune, and whether it fall upon vice or 

5 virtue, adds to the interest and the charm of poetry — 
except only that which is connected with ideas of Disgust 
— the least taint of which disenchants the whole scene, 
and puts an end both to delight and sympathy. But what 
is it, it may be asked, that is the proper object of disgust? 

10 and what is the precise description of things which we 
think Mr. Crabbe so inexcusable for admitting? It is 
not easy to define a term at once so simple and so sig- 
nificant ; but it may not be without its use, to indicate, 
in a general way, our conception of its true force and 

15 comprehension. 

It is needless, we suppose, to explain what are the 
objects of disgust in physical or external existences. 
These are sufficiently plain and unequivocal ; and it is 
universally admitted, that all mention of them must be 

20 carefully excluded from every poetical description. With 
regard, again, to human character, action, and feeling, we 
should be inclined to term every thing disgusting, which 
represented misery, without making any appeal to our love, 
respect, or admiration. If the suffering person be 

25 amiable, the delightful feeling of love and affection 
tempers the pain which the contemplation of suffering 
has a tendency to excite, and enhances it into the 
stronger, and therefore more attractive, sensation of 
pity. If there be great power or energy, however, united 

30 to guilt or wretchedness, the mixture of admiration exalts 
the emotion into something that is sublime and pleasing : 
and even in cases of mean and atrocious, but efficient 
guilt, our sympathy with the victims upon whom it is 
practised, and our active indignation and desire of 



THE BOROUGH. 75 

vengeance, reconcile us to the humiliating display, and 
make a compound that, upon the whole, is productive of 
pleasure. 

The only sufferers, then, upon whom we cannot bear 
to look, are those that excite pain by their wretchedness, 5 
while they are too depraved to be the objects of affection, 
and too weak and insignificant to be the causes of 
misery to others, or, consequently, of indignation to the 
spectators. Such are the depraved, abject, diseased, and 
neglected poor — creatures in whom every thing amiable 10 
or respectable has been extinguished by sordid passions 
or brutal debauchery ; — who have no means of doing 
the mischief of which they are capable — whom every 
one despises, and no one can either love or fear. On the 
characters, the miseries, and the vices of such beings, we 15 
look with disgust merely : and, though it may perhaps 
serve some moral purpose, occasionally to set before us 
this humiliating spectacle of human nature sunk to utter 
worthlessness and insignificance, it is altogether in vain to 
think of exciting pity or horror, by the truest and most 20 
forcible representations of their sufferings or their 
enormities. They have no hold upon any of the feelings 
that lead us to take an interest in our fellow-creatures ; — 
we turn away from them, therefore, with loathing 
and dispassionate aversion ; — we feel our imaginations 25 
polluted by the intrusion of any images connected with 
them ; and are offended and disgusted when we are 
forced to look closely upon those festering heaps of 
moral filth and corruption. 

It is with concern we add, that we know no writer who 3° 
has sinned so deeply in this respect as Mr. Crabbe — who 
has so often presented us with spectacles which it is 
purely painful and degrading to contemplate, and bestowed 
such powers of conception and expression in giving us 



76 THE BOROUGH. 

distinct ideas of what we must ever abhor to remember. 
If Mr. Crabbe had been a person of ordinary talents, 
we might have accounted for his error, in some degree, 
by supposing, that his frequent success in treating of 
5 subjects which had been usually rejected by other poets, 
had at length led him to disregard, altogether, the common 
impressions of mankind as to what was allowable and 
what inadmissible in poetry ; and to reckon the unalter- 
able laws by which nature has regulated our sympathies, 

10 among the prejudices by which they were shackled and 
impaired. It is difficult, however, to conceive how a 
writer of his quick and exact observation should have 
failed to perceive, that there is not a single instance of a 
serious interest being excited by an object of disgust ; 

15 and that Shakespeare himself, who has ventured every 
thing, has never ventured to shock our feelings with the 
crimes or the sufferings of beings absolutely without 
power or principle. Independent of universal practice, 
too, it is still more difficult to conceive how he should 

20 have overlooked the reason on which this practice is 
founded ; for though it be generally true, that poetical 
representations of suffering and of guilt produce emotion, 
and consequently delight, yet it certainly did not require 
the penetration of Mr. Crabbe to discover, that there is 

25 a degree of depravity which counteracts our sympathy 
with suffering, and a degree of insignificance which 
extinguishes our interest in guilt. We abstain from 
giving any extracts in support of this accusation ; but 
those who have perused the volume before us, will have 

30 already recollected the story of Frederic Thompson, of 
Abel Keene, of Blaney, of Benbow, and a good part 
of those of Grimes and Ellen Orford — besides many 
shorter passages. It is now time, however, to give the 
reader a more particular account of the work which 

35 contains them. 



TALES OF THE HALL. 



By the Reverend George Crabbe. 2 vols. 8vo, pp. &jo. London, i8ig. 



Mr. Crabbe is the greatest mannerist, perhaps, of all 
our living poets ; and it is rather unfortunate that the 
most prominent features of his mannerism are not the 
most pleasing. The homely, quaint, and prosaic style 
— the flat, and often broken jingling versification — the 5 
eternal full-lengths of low and worthless characters — 
with their accustomed garnishings of sly jokes and familiar 
moralising — are all on the surface of his writings ; and 
are almost unavoidably the things by which we are 
first reminded of him, when we take up any of his new 10 
productions. Yet they are not the things that truly con- 
stitute his peculiar manner ; or give that character by 
which he will, and ought to be, remembered with future 
generations. It is plain enough, indeed, that these are 
things that will make nobody remembered — and can 15 
never, therefore, be really characteristic of some of the 
most original and powerful poetry that the world has ever 
seen. 

Mr. C, accordingly, has other gifts ; and those not 
less peculiar or less strongly marked than the blemishes 20 
with which they are contrasted ; an unrivalled and almost 
magical power of observation, resulting in descriptions so 
true to nature as to strike us rather as transcripts than 
imitations — an anatomy of character and feeling not less 
exquisite and searching — an occasional touch of match- 25 



78 TALES OF THE HALL. 

less tenderness — and a deep and dreadful parthetic, inter- 
spersed by fits, and strangely interwoven with the most 
minute and humble of his details. Add to all this the 
sure and profound sagacity of the remarks with which he 
5 every now and then startles us in the midst of very 
unambitious discussions ; — and the weight and terseness 
of the maxims which he drops, like oracular responses, 
on occasions that give no promise of such a revelation ; 
— and last, though not least, that sweet and seldom 

lo sounded chord of Lyrical inspiration, the lightest touch 
of which instantly charms away all harshness from his 
numbers, and all lowness from his themes — and at once 
exalts him to a level with the most energetic and inven- 
tive poets of his age. 

15 These, we think, are the true characteristics of the 
genius of this great wTiter ; and it is in their mixture 
with the oddities and defects to which we have already 
alluded, that the peculiarity of his manner seems to us 
substantially to consist. The ingredients may all of them 

20 be found, we suppose, in other writers ; but their com- 
bination — in such proportions at least as occur in this 
instance — may safely be pronounced to be original. 

Extraordinary, however, as this combination must 
appear, it does not seem very difficult to conceive in what 

25 way it may have arisen, and, so far from regarding it as 
a proof of singular humorousness, caprice, or affectation 
in the individual, we are rather inclined to hold that 
something approaching to it must be the natural result of 
a long habit of observation in a man of genius, possessed 

30 of that temper and disposition which is the usual accom- 
paniment of such a habit ; and that the same strangely 
compounded and apparently incongruous assemblage of 
themes and sentiments would be frequently produced 
under such circumstances — if authors had oftener the 



TALES OF THE HALL. 79 

courage to write from their own impressions, and had less 
fear of the laugh or wonder of the more shallow and 
barren part of their readers. 

A great talent for observation, and a delight in the 
exercise of it — the power and the practice of dissecting 5 
and disentangling that subtle and complicated tissue, of 
habit, and self-love, and affection, which constitute human 
character — seems to us, in all cases, to imply a contem- 
plative, rather than an active disposition. It can only 
exist, indeed, where there is a good deal of social 10 
sympathy ; for, without this, the occupation could excite 
no interest, and afford no satisfaction — but only such a 
measure and sort of sympathy as is gratified by being a 
spectator, and not an actor on the great theatre of life — 
and leads its possessor rather to look with eagerness on 15 
the feats and the fortunes of others, than to take a share 
for himself in the game that is played before him. Some 
stirring and vigorous spirits there are, no doubt, in which 
this taste and talent is combined with a more thorough 
and effective sympathy ; and leads to the study of men's 20 
characters by an actual and hearty participation in their 
various passions and pursuits ; — though it is to be 
remarked, that when such persons embody their observa- 
tions in writing, they will generally be found to exhibit 
their characters in action, rather than to describe them in 25 
the abstract ; and to let their various personages disclose 
themselves and their peculiarities, as it were spontane- 
ously, and without help or preparation, in their ordinary 
conduct and speech — of all which we have a very 
splendid and striking example in the Tales of My Land- 30 
lord, and the other pieces of that extraordinary writer. 
In the common case, however, a great observer, we 
believe, will be found, pretty certainly, to be a person of 
a shy and retiring temper — who does not mingle enough 



So TALES OF THE HALL. • 

with the people he surveys, to be heated with their 
passions, or infected with their delusions — and who has 
usually been led, indeed, to take up the office of a looker 
on, from some little infirmity of nerves, or weakness of 
5 spirits, which has unfitted him from playing a more 
active part on the busy scene of existence. 

Now, it is very obvious, we think, that this contem- 
plative turn, and this alienation from the vulgar pursuits 
of mankind, must in the first place, produce a great con- 

10 tempt for most of those pursuits, and the objects they 
seek to obtain — a levelling of the factitious distinctions 
which human pride and vanity have established in the 
world, and a mingled scorn and compassion for the lofty 
pretensions under which men so often disguise the noth- 

15 ingness of their chosen occupations. When the many- 
coloured scene of life, with all its petty agitations, its 
shifting pomps, and perishable passions, is surveyed by 
one who does not mix in its business, it is impossible 
that it should not appear a very pitiable and almost 

20 ridiculous affair; or that the heart should not echo 
back the brief and emphatic exclamation of the mighty 

dramatist — 

" Life's a poor player, 

Who frets and struts his hour upon the stage, 
25 And then is heard no more ! " — 

Or the more sarcastic amplification of it, in the words 
of our great moral poet — 

" Behold the Child, by Nature's kindly law, 
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickl'd with a straw ! 

30 Some livelier plaything gives our Youth delight, 

A little louder, but as empty quite : 
Scarfs, garters, gold our riper years engage ; 
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of Age ! 
Pleas'd with this bauble still as that before, , 

35 Till tir'd we sleep — and Life' s poor play is o'er I " 



TALES OF THE HALL. 8 1 

This is the more solemn view of the subject : — But 
the first fruits ot observation are most commonly found 
to issue in Satire — the unmasking the vain pretenders to 
wisdom, and worth, and happiness, with whom society is 
infested, and holding up to the derision of mankind those 5 
meannesses of the great, those miseries of the fortunate, 
and those 

" Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise," 

which the eye of a dispassionate observer so quickly 
detects under the glittering exterior by which they would 10 
fain be disguised — and which bring pretty much to a 
level the intellect, and morals, and enjoyments, of the 
great mass of mankind. 

This misanthropic end has unquestionably been by far 
the most common result of a habit of observation ; and 15 
that in which its effects have most generally terminated : 
Yet we cannot bring ourselves to think that it is their 
just or natural termination. Something, no doubt, will 
depend on the temper of the individual, and the propor- 
tions in which the gall and the milk of human kindness 20 
have been originally mingled in his composition. — Yet 
satirists, we think, have not in general been ill-natured 
persons — and we are inclined rather to ascribe this 
limited and uncharitable application of their powers of 
observation to their love of fame and popularity, — which 25 
are well known to be best secured by successful ridicule 
or invective — or, quite as probably, indeed, to the 
narrowness and insufficiency of the observations them- 
selves, and the imperfection of their talents for their due 
conduct and extension. It is certain, at least, we think, 30 
that the satirist makes use of but half the discoveries of 
the observer ; and teaches but half — the worser half- 
of the lessons which may be deduced from his occupa- 



82 TALES OF THE HALL. 

tion. He puts down, indeed, the proud pretensions of 
the great and arrogant, and levels the vain distinctions 
which human ambition has established among the 
brethren of mankind ; he 

5 " Bares the mean heart that lurks beneath a Star," 

— rand destroys the illusions which would limit our 
sympathy to the forward and figuring persons of this 
world — the favourites of fame and fortune. But the 
true result of observation should be, not so much to cast 

lo down the proud, as to raise up the lowly ; — not so 
much to diminish our sympathy with the powerful and 
renowned, as to extend it to all, who, in humbler condi- 
tions, have. the same, or still higher claims on our esteem 
or affection. — It is not surely the natural consequence 

i^ of learning to judge truly of the characters of men, that 
we should despise or be indifferent about them all ; — 
and, though we have learned to see through the false 
glare which plays round the envied summits of existence, 
and to know how little dignity, or happiness, or worth, or 

20 wisdom, may sometimes belong to the possessors of 
power, and fortune, and learning and renown, — it does 
not follow, by any means, that we should look upon the 
whole of human life as a mere deceit and imposture^ 
or think the concerns of our species fit subjects only 

25 for scorn and derision. Our promptitude to admire and 
to envy will indeed be corrected, our enthusiasm abated, 
and our distrust of appearances increased ; — but the 
sympathies and affections of our nature will continue, and 
be better directed — our love of our kind will not be 

30 diminished — and our indulgence for their faults and 
follies, if we read our lesson aright, will be signally 
strengthened and confirmed. The true and proper effect, 
therefore, of a habit of observation, and a thorough and 



TALES OF THE HALL. 83 

penetrating knowledge of human character, will be, not 
to extinguish our sympathy, but to extend it — to turn, 
no doubt, many a throb of admiration, and many a sigh 
of love into a smile of derison or of pity ; but at the 
same time to reveal much that commands our homage 5 
and excites our affection, in those humble and unexplored 
regions of the heart and understanding, which never 
engage the attention of the incurious, — and to bring the 
whole family of mankind nearer to a level, by finding out 
latent merits as well as latent defects in all its members, 10 
and compensating the flaws that are detected in the 
boasted ornaments of life, by bringing to light the rich- 
ness and the lustre that sleep in the mines beneath its 
surface. 

We are afraid some of our readers may not at once 15 
perceive the application of these profound remarks to 
the subject immediately before us. But there are others, 
we doubt not, who do not need to be told that they are 
intended to explain how Mr. Crabbe, and other persons 
with the same gift of observation, should so often busy 20 
themselves with what may be considered as low and 
vulgar character ; and, declining all dealings with heroes 
and heroic topics, should not only venture to seek for an 
interest in the concerns of ordinary mortals, but actually 
intersperse small pieces of ridicule with their undignified 25 
pathos, and endeavour to make their readers look on their 
book with the same mingled feelings of compassion and 
amusement, with which — unnatural as it may appear to 
the readers of poetry — they, and all judicious observers, 
actually look upon human life and human nature. — This, 30 
we are persuaded, is the true key to the greater part of 
the peculiarities of the author before us ; and though we 
have disserted upon it a little longer than was necessary, 
we really think it may enable our readers to comprehend 



84 TALES OF THE HALL, 

him, and our remarks on him, something better than they 
could have done without it. 

There is, as everybody must have felt, a strange satire 
and sympathy in all his productions — a great kindliness 
5 and compassion for the errors and sufferings of our poor 
human nature, but a strong distrust of its heroic virtues 
and high pretensions. His heart is always open to pity, 
and all the milder emotions — but there is little aspira- 
tion after the grand and sublime of character, nor very 

10 much encouragement for raptures and ecstasies of any 
description. These, he seems to think, are things rather 
too fine for the said poor human nature : and that, in our 
low and erring condition, it is a little ridiculous to pre- 
tend, either to very exalted and immaculate virtue, or 

15 very pure and exquisite happiness. He not only never 
meddles, therefore, with the delicate distresses and noble 
fires of the heroes and heroines of tragic and epic fable, 
but may generally be detected indulging in a lurking 
sneer at the pomp and vanity of all such superfine 

20 imaginations — and turning from them, to draw men in 
their true postures and dimensions, and with all the 
imperfections that actually belong to their condition: — 
the prosperous and happy overshadowed with passing 
clouds of eftJiui, and disturbed with little flaws of bad 

25 humour and discontent — the great and wise beset at 
times with strange weaknesses and meannesses and 
paltry vexations — and even the most virtuous and 
enlightened falling far below the standard of poetical 
perfection — and stooping every now and then to paltry 

30 jealousies and prejudices — or sinking into shabby sensu- 
alities — or meditating on their own excellence and 
importance, with a ludicrous and lamentable anxiety. 

This is one side of the picture ; and characterises 
sufficiently the satirical vein of our author : But the other 



TALES OF THE HALL. S5 

is the most extensive and important. In rejecting the 
vulgar sources of interest in poetical narratives, and 
reducing his ideal persons to the standard of reality, 
Mr. C. does by no means seek to extinguish the sparks 
of human sympathy within us, or to throw any damp on 5 
the curiosity with which we naturally explore the char- 
acters of each other. On the contrary, he has afforded 
new and more wholesome food for all those propensities 
— and, by placing before us those details which our 
pride or fastidiousness is so apt to overlook, has dis- 10 
closed, in all their truth and simplicity, the native and 
unadulterated workings of those affections which are at 
the bottom of all social interest, and are really rendered 
less touching by the exaggerations of more ambitious 
artists — while he exhibits, with admirable force and 15 
endless variety, all those combinations of passions and 
opinions, and all that cross-play of selfishness and 
vanity, and indolence and ambition, and habit and 
reason, which make up the intellectual character of 
individuals, and present to every one an instructive 20 
picture of his neighbour or himself. Seeing, by the per- 
fection of his art, the master passions in their springs, 
and the high capacities in their rudiments — and having 
acquired the gift of tracing all the propensities and 
marking tendencies of our plastic nature, in their first 25 
slight indications, or even from the aspect of the dis- 
guises they so often assume, he does not need, in order 
to draw out his characters in all their life and distinct- 
ness, the vulgar demonstration of those striking and 
decided actions by which their maturity is proclaimed 30 
even to the careless and inattentive; — but delights to 
point out to his readers, the seeds or tender filaments of 
those talents and feelings which wait only for occasion • 
and opportunity to burst out and astonish the world — 



86 TALES OF THE HALL. 

and to accustom them to trace, in characters and actions 
apparently of the most ordinary description, the self-same 
attributes that, under other circumstances, would attract 
universal attention, and furnish themes for the most 
5 popular and impassioned descriptions. 

That he should not be guided in the choice of his 
subject by any regard to the rank or condition which his 
persons hold in society, may easily be imagined ; and, 
with a view to the ends he aims at, might readily be 

lo forgiven. But we fear that his passion for observation, 
and the delight he takes in tracing out and analyzing all 
the little traits that indicate character, and all the little 
circumstances that influence it, have sometimes led him 
to be careless about his selection of the instances in 

15 which it was to be exhibited, or at least to select them 
upon principles very different from those which give them 
an interest in the eyes of ordinary readers. For the 
purpose of mere anatomy, beauty of form or complexion 
are things quite indifferent ; and the physiologist, who 

20 examines plants only to study their internal structure, 
and to make himself master of the contrivances by which 
their various functions are performed, pays no regard to 
the brilliancy of their hues, the sweetness of their odours, 
or the graces of their form. Those who come to him 

25 for the sole purpose of acquiring knowledge may partici- 
pate perhaps in this indifference ; but the world at large 
will wonder at them — and he will engage fewer pupils to 
listen to his instructions, than if he had condescended in 
some degree to consult their predilections in the begin- 

30 ning. It is the same case, we think, in many respects, 
with Mr. Crabbe. Relying for the interest he is to pro- 
duce, on the curious expositions he is to make of the 
elements of human character, or at least finding his own 
chief gratification in those subtle investigations, he seems 



TALES OF THE HALL. 87 

to care very little upon what particular individuals he 
pitches for the purpose of these demonstrations. Almost 
every human mind, he seems to think, may serve to 
display that fine and mysterious mechanism which it is 
his delight to explore and explain ; — and almost every 5 
condition, and every history of life, afford occasions to 
show how it may be put into action, and pass through its 
various combinations. It seems, therefore, almost as if 
he had caught up the first dozen or two of persons that 
came across him in the ordinary walks of life, — and then 10 
fitting in his little window in their breasts, and applying 
his tests and instruments of observation, had set himself 
about such a minute and curious scrutiny of their whole 
habits, history, adventures, and dispositions, as he 
thought must ultimately create not only a familiarity, but 15 
an interest, which the first aspect of the subject was far 
enough from leading any one to expect. That he 
succeeds more frequently than could have been antici- 
pated, we are very willing to allow. But we cannot help 
feeling, also, that a little more pains bestowed in the 20 
selection of his characters, would have made his power 
of observation and description tell with tenfold effect ; 
and that, in spite of the exquisite truth of his delinea- 
tions, and the fineness of the perceptions by which he 
was enabled to make them, it is impossible to take any 25 
considerable interest in many of his personages, or to 
avoid feeling some degree of fatigue at the minute and 
patient exposition that is made of all that belongs to 
them. 



ENDYMION. 



A Poetic Romance. By John Keats. 8vo, pp. 2oy. London, 1818. 



We had never happened to see either of these volumes 
till very lately — and have been exceedingly struck with 
the genius they display, and the spirit of poetry which 
breathes through all their extravagance. That imitation 
5 of our old writers, and especially of our older dramatists, 
to which we cannot help flattering ourselves that we have 
somewhat contributed, has brought on, as it were, a 
second spring in our poetry ; — and few of its blossoms 
are either more profuse of sweetness, or richer in promise, 

10 than this which is now before us. Mr. Keats, we under- 
stand, is still a very young man ; and his whole works, 
indeed, bear evideace enough of the fact. They are full 
of extravagance and irregularity, rash attempts at origi- 
nality, interminable wanderings, and excessive obscurity. 

15 They manifestly require, therefore, all the indulgence 
that can be claimed for a first attempt : — But we think 
it no less plain that they deserve it : For they are flushed 
all over with the rich lights of fancy ; and so coloured 
and bestrewn with the flowers of poetry ; that even while 

20 perplexed and bewildered in their labyrinths, it is im- 
possible to resist the intoxication of their sweetness, or 
to shut our hearts to the enchantments they so lavishly 
present. The models upon which he has formed himself, 
in the Endymion, the earliest and by much the most con- 

25 siderable of his poems, are obviously The Faithful 



ENDYMION. 89 

Shepherdess of Fletcher, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben 
Jonson ; — the exquisite metres and inspired diction of 
which he has copied with great boldness and fidelity — 
and, like his great originals, has also contrived to impart 
to the whole piece that true rural and poetical air — 5 
which breathes only in them, and in Theocritus — which 
is at once homely and majestic, luxurious and rude, and 
sets before us the genuine sights and sounds and smells 
of the country, with all the magic and grace of Elysium. 
His subject has the disadvantage of being Mythological ; 10 
and in this respect, as well as on account of the raised 
and rapturous tone it consequently assumes, his poem, it 
may be thought, would be better compared to the Comus 
and the Arcades of Milton, of which, also, there are 
many traces of imitation. The great distinction, how- 15 
ever, between him and these divine authors, is, that 
imagination in them is subordinate to reason and judg- 
ment, while, with him, it is paramount and supreme — 
that their ornaments and images are employed to em- 
bellish and recommend just sentiments, engaging inci- 20 
dents, and natural characters, while his are poured out 
without measure or restraint, and with no apparent 
design but to unburden the breast of the author, and give 
vent to the overflowing vein of his fancy. The thin and 
scanty tissue of his story is merely the light framework 25 
on which his florid wreaths are suspended ; and while 
his imaginations go rambling and entangling themselves 
every where, like wild honeysuckles, all idea of sober 
reason, and plan, and consistency, is utterly forgotten, 
and " strangled in their waste fertility." A great part of 30 
the work, indeed, is written in the strangest and most 
fantastical manner that can be imagined. It seems as if 
the author had ventured every thing that occured to him 
in the shape of a glittering image or striking expression 



90 ENDYMION. 

— taken the first word that presented itself to make up a 
rhyme, and then made that word the germ of a new 
cluster of images — a hint for a new excursion of the 
fancy — and so wandered on, equally forgetful whence he 

5 came, and heedless whither he was going, till he had 
covered his pages with an interminable arabesque of 
connected and incongruous figures, that multiplied as 
they extended, and were only harmonised by the bright- 
ness of their tints, and the graces of their forms. In 

lo this rash and headlong career he has of course many 
lapses and failures. There is no work, accordingly, from 
which a malicious critic could cull more matter for 
ridicule, or select more obscure, unnatural, or absurd 
passages. But we do not take that to be our office ; — 

15 and must beg leave, on the contrary, to say, that any one 
who, on this account, would represent the whole poem as 
despicable, must either have no notion of poetry, or no 
regard to truth. 

It is, in truth, at least as full of genius as of absurdity ; 

20 and he who does not find a great deal in it to admire and 
to give delight, cannot in his heart see much beauty in 
the two exquisite dramas to which we have already 
alluded ; or find any great pleasure in some of the finest 
creations of Milton and Shakespeare. There are very 

25 many such persons, we verily believe, even among the 
reading and judicious part of the community — correct 
scholars, we have no doubt, many of them, and, it may 
be, very classical composers in prose and in verse — but 
utterly ignorant, on our view of the matter, of the true 

30 genius of English poetry, and incapable of estimating its 
appropriate and most exquisite beauties. With that 
spirit we have no hesitation in saying that Mr. Keats is 
deeply imbued — and of those beauties he has presented 
us with many striking examples. We are very much 



ENDYMION. 91 

inclined indeed to add, that we do not know any book 
which we would sooner employ as a test to ascertain 
whether any one had in him a native relish for poetry, 
and a genuine sensibility to its intrinsic charm. The 
greater and more distinguished poets of our country have 5 
so much else in them, to gratify other tastes and pro- 
pensities, that they are pretty sure to captivate and 
amuse those to whom their poetry may be but an hinder- 
ance and obstruction, as well as those to whom it 
constitutes their chief attraction. The interest of the 10 
stories they tell — the vivacity of the characters they 
delineate — the weight and force of the maxims and 
sentiments in which they abound — the very pathos, and 
wit and humour they display, which may all and each of 
them exist apart from their poetry, and independent of it, 15 
are quite sufficient to account for their popularity, with- 
out referring much to that still higher gift, by which they 
subdue to their enchantments those whose souls are truly 
attuned to the finer impulses of poetry. It is only, 
therefore, where those other recommendations are want- 20 
ing, or exist in a weaker degree, that the true force of 
the attraction, exercised by the pure poetry with which 
they are so often combined, can be fairly appreciated : — 
where, without much incident or many characters, and 
with little wit, wisdom, or arrangement, a number of 25 
bright pictures are presented to the imagination, and a 
fine feeling expressed of those mysterious relations by 
which visible external things are assimilated with inward 
thoughts and emotions, and become the images and 
exponents of all passions and affections. To an un- 30 
poetical reader such passages will generally appear mere 
raving and absurdity — and to this censure a very great 
part of the volumes before us will certainly be exposed, 
with this class of readers. Even in the judgment of a 



92 ENDYMION. 

fitter audience, however, it must, we fear, be admitted, 
that, besides the riot and extravagance of his fancy the 
scope and substance of Mr. Keats's poetry is rather too 
dreamy and abstracted to excite the strongest interest, or 
5 to sustain the attention through a work of any great 
compass or extent. He deals too much with shadowy and 
incomprehensible beings, and is too constantly rapt into 
an extramundane Elysium, to command a lasting interest 
with ordinary mortals — and must employ the agency of 

lo more varied and coarser emotions, if he wishes to take 
rank with the enduring poets of this or of former genera- 
tions. There is something very curious, too, we think, 
in the way in which he, and Mr. Barry Cornwall also, 
have dealt with the Pagan mythology, of which they have 

15 made so much use in their poetry. Instead of presenting 
its imaginary persons under the trite and vulgar traits 
that belong to them in the ordinary systems, little more 
is borrowed from these than the general conception of 
their condition and relations ; and an original character 

20 and distinct individuality is then bestowed upon them, 
which has all the merit of invention, and all the grace 
and attraction of the fictions on which it is engrafted. 
The ancients, though they probably did not stand in any 
great awe of their deities, have yet abstained very much 

25 from any minute or dramatic representation of their 
feelings and affections. In Hesiod and Homer, they 
are broadly delineated by some of their actions and 
adventures, and introduced to us merely as the agents in 
those particular transactions ; while in the Hymns, from 

30 those ascribed to Orpheus and Homer, down to those of 
Callimachus, we have little but pompous epithets and 
invocations, with a flattering commemoration of their 
most famous exploits — and are never allowed to enter 
into their bosoms, or follow out the train of their feelings, 



ENDYMION. 93 

with the presumption of our human sympathy. Except 
the love-song of the Cyclops to his Sea Nymph in 
Theocritus — the Lamentation of Venus for Adonis in 
Moschus — and the more recent Legend of Apuleius, we 
scarcely recollect a_ passage in all the writings of anti- 5 
quity in which the passions of an immortal are fairly dis- 
closed to the scrutiny and observation of men. The 
author before us, however, and some of his contem- 
poraries, have dealt differently with the subject ; — and, 
sheltering the violence of the fiction under the ancient 10 
traditionary fable, have in reality created and imagined 
an entire new set of characters ; and brought closely and 
minutely before us the loves and sorrows and perplexities 
of beings, with whose names and supernatural attributes 
we had long been familiar, without any sense or feeling 15 
of their personal character. We have more than doubts 
of the fitness of such personages to maintain a permanent 
interest with the modern public ; — but the way in which 
they are here managed certainly gives them the best 
chance that now remains for them ; and, at all events, it 20 
cannot be denied that the effect is striking and graceful. 
But we must now proceed to our extracts. 



CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 



Canto the Third. By Lord Byron. 8vo, pp. yg. London, 1816. ^ 



If the finest poetry be that which leaves the deepest 
impression on the minds of its readers — and this is not 
the worst test of its excellence — Lord Byron, we think, 
must be allowed to take precedence of all his distin- 
5 guished contemporaries. He has not the variety of 
Scott — nor the delicacy of Campbell — nor the absolute 
truth of Crabbe — nor the polished sparkling of Moore ; 
but in force of diction, and inextinguishable energy of 
sentiment, he clearly surpasses them all. '' Words that 

10 breathe, and thoughts that burn," are not merely the 
ornaments, but the common staple of his poetry ; and 
he is not inspired or impressive only in some happy 
passages, but through the whole body and tissue of his 
composition. It was an unavoidable condition, perhaps, 

15 of this higher excellence, that his scene should be 

1 1 have already said so much of Lord Byron with reference to 
his Dramatic productions, that I cannot now afford to repubUsh 
more than one other paper on the subject of his poetry in general : 
And I select this, rather because it refers to a greater variety of 
these compositions, than because it deals with such as are either 
absolutely the best, or the most characteristic of his genius. The 
truth is, however, that all his writings are characteristic ; and lead, 
pretty much alike, to those views of the dark and the bright parts 
of his nature, which have led me, I fear (though almost irresistibly) 
into observations more personal to the character of the author, than 
should generally be permitted to a mere literary censor. 



CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 95 

narrow, and his persons few. To compass such ends as 
he had in view, it was necessary to reject all ordinary 
agents, and all trivial combinations. He could not 
possibly be amusing, or ingenious or playful ; or hope to 
maintain the requisite pitch of interest by the recitation 5 
of sprightly adventures, or the opposition of common 
characters. To produce great effects, in short, he felt 
that it was necessary to deal only with the greater 
passions — with the exaltations of a daring fancy, and 
the errors of a lofty intellect — with the pride, the 10 
terrors, and the agonies of strong emotion — the fire and 
air alone of our human elements. 

In this respect, and in his general notion of the end 
and the means of poetry, we have sometimes thought 
that his views fell more in with those of the Lake poets, 15 
than of any other existing party in the poetical common- 
wealth : And, in some of his later productions especially, 
it is impossible not to be struck with his occasional 
approaches to the style and manner of this class of 
writers. Lord Byron, however, it should be observed, 20 
like all other persons of a quick sense of beauty, and 
sure enough of their own originality to be in no fear 
of paltry imputations, is a great mimic of styles and 
manners, and a great borrower of external character. 
He and Scott, accordingly, are full of imitations of all 25 
the writers from whom they have ever derived gratifica- 
tion ; and the two most original writers of the age might 
appear, to superficial observers, to be the most deeply 
indebted to their predecessors. In this particular instance, 
we have no fault to find with Lord Byron. For undoubt- 30 
edly the finer passages of Wordsworth and Southey have 
in them wherewithal to lend an impulse to the utmost 
ambition of rival genius ; and their diction and manner 
of writing is frequently both striking and original. But 



96 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 

we must say, that it would afford us still greater pleasure 
to find these tuneful gentlemen returning the compliment 
which Lord Byron has here paid to their talents ; and 
forming themselves on the model rather of his imitations, 
5 than of their own originals. — In those imitations they 
will find that, though he is sometimes abundantly mystical, 
he never, or at least very rarely, indulges in absolute 
nonsense — never takes his lofty flights upon mean or 
ridiculous occasions — and, above all, never dilutes his 

10 strong conceptions, and magnificent imaginations, with a 
flood of oppressive verbosity. On the contrary, he is, of 
all living writers, the most concise and condensed ; 
and, we would fain hope, may go far, by his example, to 
redeem the great reproach of our modern literature — its 

15 intolerable prolixity and redundance. In his nervous 
and manly lines, we find no elaborate amplification of 
common sentiments — no ostentatious polishing of pretty 
expressions ; and we really think that the brilliant success 
which has rewarded his disdain of those paltry artifices, 

20 should put to shame for ever that puling and self-admiring 
race, who can live through half a volume on the stock of 
a single thought, and expatiate over divers fair quarto 
pages with the details of one tedious description. In 
Lorci Byron, on the contrary, we have a perpetual stream 

25 of thick-coming fancies — an eternal spring of fresh- 
blown images, which seem called into existence by the 
sudden flash of those glowing thoughts and overwhelming 
emotions, that struggle for expression through the whole 
flow of his poetry — and impart to a diction that is often 

30 abrupt and irregular, a force and a charm which frequently 
realize all that is said of inspiration. 

With all these undoubted claims to our admiration, 
however, it is impossible to deny that the noble author 
before us has still something to learn, and a good deal to 



CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 97 

correct. He is frequently abrupt and careless, and some- 
times obscure. There are marks, occasionally, of effort 
and straining after an emphasis, which is generally 
spontaneous ; and, above all, there is far too great a 
monotony in the moral colouring of his pictures, and too 5 
much repetition of the same sentiments and maxims. 
He delights too exclusively in the delineation of a 
certain morbid exaltation of character and feeling — a 
sort of demoniacal sublimity, not without some traits of 
the ruined Archangel. He is haunted almost perpetually 10 
with the image of a being feeding and fed upon by 
violent passions, and the recollections of the catas- 
trophes they have occasioned : And, though worn out 
by their past indulgence, unable to sustain the burden 
of an existence which they do not continue to animate : 15 
— full of pride, and revenge, and obduracy — disdaining 
life and death, and mankind and himself — and trampling, 
in his scorn, not only upon the falsehood and formality 
of polished life, but upon its tame virtues and slavish 
devotion : Yet envying, by fits, the very beings he de- 20 
spises, and melting into mere softness and compassion, 
when the helplessness of childhood or the frailty of 
woman make an appeal to his generosity. Such is the 
person with whom we are called upon almost exclu- 
sively to sympathise in all the greater productions of 25 
this distinguished writer : — In Childe Harold — in the 
Corsair — in Lara — in the Siege of Corinth — in Parisina, 
and in most of the smaller pieces. 

It is impossible to represent such a character better 
than Lord Byron has done in all these productions — or 30 
indeed to represent any thing more terrible in its anger, 
or more attractive in its relenting. In point of effect, we 
readily admit, that no one character can be more poetical 
or impressive : — But it is really too much to find the 



98 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 

scene perpetually filled by one character — not only in 
all the acts of each several drama, but in all the different 
dramas of the series ; — and, grand and impressive as it 
is, we feel at last that these very qualities make some 

5 relief more indispensable, and oppress the spirits of 
ordinary mortals with too deep an impression of awe 
and repulsion. There is too much guilt in short, and 
too much gloom, in the leading character ; — and though 
it be a fine thing to gaze, now and then, on stormy seas, 

10 and thunder-shaken mountains, we should prefer passing 
our days in sheltered valleys, and by the murmur of 
calmer waters. 

We are aware that these metaphors may be turned 
against us — and that, without metaphor, it may be said 

15 that men do not pass their days in reading poetry — and 
that, as they may look into Lord Byron only about as 
often as they look abroad upon tempests, they have no 
more reason to complain of him for being grand and 
gloomy, than to complain of the same qualities in the 

20 glaciers and volcanoes which they go so far to visit. 
Painters, too, it may be said, have often gained great 
reputation by their representations of tigers and other 
ferocious animals, or of caverns and banditti — and 
poets should be allowed, without reproach, to indulge 

25 in analogous exercises. We are far from thinking that 
there is no weight in these considerations ; and feel how 
plausibly it may be said, that we have no better reason 
for a great part of our complaint, than that an author, to 
whom we are already very greatly indebted, has chosen 

30 rather to please himself, than us, in the use he makes of 
his talents. 

This, no doubt, seems both unreasonable and ungrate- 
ful. But it is nevertheless true, that a public benefactor 
becomes a debtor to the public, and is, in some degree, 



CHILD E HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 99 

responsible for the employment of those gifts which seem 
to be conferred upon him, not merely for his own delight, 
but for the delight and improvement of his fellows through 
all generations. Independent of this, however, we think 
there is a reply to the apology. A great living poet is 5 
not like a distant volcano, or an occasional tempest. He 
is a volcano in the heart of our land, and a cloud that 
hangs over our dwellings ; and we have some reason 
to complain, if, instead of genial warmth and grateful 
shade, he voluntarily darkens and inflames our atmos- 10 
phere with perpetual fiery explosions and pitchy vapours. 
Lord Byron's poetry, in short, is too attractive and too 
famous to lie dormant or inoperative ; and, therefore, if 
it produce any painful or pernicious effects, there will 
be murmurs, and ought to be suggestions of alteration. 15 
Now, though an artist may draw fighting tigers and 
hungry lions in as lively or natural a way as he can, 
without giving any encouragement to human ferocity, 
or even much alarm to human fear, the case is somewhat 
different, when a poet represents men with tiger-like 20 
dispositions : — and yet more so, when he exhausts the 
resources of his genius to make this terrible being 
interesting and attractive, and to represent all the lofty 
virtues as the natural allies of his ferocity. It is still 
worse when he proceeds to show, that all these precious 25 
gifts of dauntless courage, strong affection, and high 
imagination, are not only akin to guilt, but the parents 
of misery ; — and that those only have any chance of 
tranquillity or happiness in this world, whom it is the 
object of his poetry to make us shun and despise. 3° 

These, it appears to us, are not merely errors in taste, 
but perversions of morality ; and, as a great poet is 
necessarily a moral teacher, and gives forth his ethical 
lessons, in general with far more effect and authority 



lOO CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 

than any of his graver brethren, he is peculiarly liable 
to the censures reserved for those who turn the means of 
improvement to purposes of corruption. 

It may no doubt be said, that poetry in general tends 
5 less to the useful than the splendid qualities of our 
nature — that a character poetically good has long been 
distinguished from one that is morally so — and that, 
ever since the time of Achilles, our sympathies, on such 
occasions, have been chiefly engrossed by persons whose 

lo deportment is by no means exemplary ; and who in many 
points approach to the temperament of Lord Byron's ideal 
hero. There is some truth in this suggestion also. But 
other poets, in \\i^ first place, do not allow their favourites 
so outrageous a monopoly of the glory and interest of the 

15 piece — and sin less therefore against the laws either of 
poetical or distributive justice. In the second place, their 
heroes are not, generally, either so bad or so good as 
Lord Byron's — and do not indeed very much exceed the 
standard of truth and nature, in either of the extremes. 

20 His, however, are as monstrous and unnatural as centaurs, 
and hippogriffs — and must ever figure in the eye of sober 
reason as so many bright and hateful impossibilities. But 
the most important distinction is, that the other poets 
who deal in peccant heroes, neither feel nor express that 

25 ardent affection for them, which is visible in the whole 
of this author's delineations ; but merely make use of 
them as necessary agents in the extraordinary adventures 
they have to detail, and persons whose minged vices and 
virtues are requisite to bring about the catastrophe of 

30 their story. In Lord Byron, however, the interest of the 
story, where there happens to be one, which is not always 
the case, is uniformly postponed to that of the character 
itself — into which he enters so deeply, and with so 
extraordinary a fondness, that he generally continues 



CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. loi 

to speak in its language, after it has been dismissed 
from the stage ; and to inculcate, on his own authority, 
the same sentiments which had been previously recom- 
mended by its example. We do not consider it as unfair, 
therefore, to say that Lord Byron appears to us to be 5 
the zealous apostle of a certain fierce and magnificent 
misanthropy ; which has already saddened his poetry 
with too deep a shade, and not only led to a great mis- 
application of great talents, but contributed to render 
popular some very false estimates of the constituents of 10 
human happiness and merit. It is irksome, however, to 
dwell upon observations so general — and we shall prob- 
ably have better means of illustrating these remarks, if 
they are really well founded, when we come to speak of 
the particular publications by which they have now been 15 
suggested. 

We had the good fortune, we believe, to be among the 
first who proclaimed the rising of a new luminary, on the • 
appearance of Childe Harold on the poetical horizon, — 
and we pursued his course with due attention through 20 
several of the constellations. If we have lately omitted 
to record his progress with the same accuracy, it is by no 
means because we have regarded it with more indifference, 
or supposed that it would be less interesting to the 
public — but because it was so extremely conspicuous as 25 
no longer to require the notices of an official observer. 
In general, we do not think it necessary, nor indeed 
quite fair, to oppress our readers with an account of 
works, which are as well known to them as to ourselves ; 
or with a repetition of sentiments in which all the world 30 
is agreed. Wherever, a work, therefore, is very popular, 
and where the general opinion of its merits appears to be 
substantially right, we think ourselves at liberty to leave 
it out of our chronicle, without incurring the censure of 



I02 CHILD E HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 

neglect or inattention. A very rigorous application of 
this maxim might have saved our readers the trouble of 
reading what we now write — and, to confess the truth, 
we write it rather to gratify ourselves, than with the hope 
5 of giving them much information. At the same time, 
some short notice of the progress of such a writer ought, 
perhaps, to appear in his comtemporary journals, as a 
tribute due to his eminence ; — and a zealous critic can 
scarcely set about examining the merits of any work, or 
lo the nature of its reception by the public, without speedily 
discovering very urgent cause for his admonitions, both 
to the author and his admirers. 

The most considerable of [the author's recent publica- 

15 tions,] is the Third Canto of Childe Harold ; a work 
which has the disadvantage of all continuations, in 
admitting of little absolute novelty in the plan of the 

. work or the cast of its character, and must, besides, 
remind all Lord Byron's readers of the extraordinary 

20 effect produced by the sudden blazing forth of his 
genius, upon their first introduction to that title. In 
spite of all this, however, we are persuaded that this 
Third Part of the poem will not be pronounced in- 
ferior to either of the former ; and, we think, will prob- 

25 ably be ranked above them by those who have been most 
delighted with the whole. The great success 'of this 
singular production,- indeed, has always appeared to us 
an extraordinary proof of its merits ; for, with all its 
genius, it does not belong to a sort of poetry that rises 

30 easily to popularity. — It has no story or action — very 
little variety of character — and a great deal of reasoning 
and reflection of no very attractive tenor. It is sub- 
stantially a contemplative and ethical work, diversified 
with fine description, and adorned or overshaded by the 



CHILD E HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 103 

perpetual presence of one emphatic person, who is some- 
times the author, and sometimes the object, of the reflec- 
tions on which the interest is chiefly rested. It required, 
no doubt, great force of writing, and a decided tone of 
originaUty to recommend a performance of this sort so $ 
powerfully as this has been recommended to public notice 
and admiration — and those high characteristics belong 
perhaps still more eminently to the part that is now 
before us, than to any of the former. There is the same 
stern and lofty disdain of mankind, and their ordinary 10 
pu^uits and enjoyments ; with the same bright gaze on 
nature, and the same magic power of giving interest and 
effect to her delineations — but mixed up, we think, with 
deeper and more matured reflections, and a more intense 
sensibility to all that is grand or lovely in the external 15 
world. — Harold, in short, is somewhat older since he 
last appeared upon the scene — and while the vigour of 
his intellect has been confirmed, and his confidence in 
his own opinions increased, his mind has also become 
more sensitive ; and his misanthropy, thus softened over 20 
by habits of calmer contemplation, appears less active 
and impatient, even although more deeply rooted than 
before. Undoubtedly the finest parts of the poem before 
us, are those which thus embody the weight of his moral 
sentiments ; or disclose the lofty sympathy which binds 25 
the despiser of Man to the glorious aspects of Nature. 
It is in these, we think, that the great attractions of the 
work consist, and the strength of the author's genius is 
seen. The narrative and mere description are of far 
inferior interest. With reference to the sentiments and 3° 
opinions, however, which thus give its distinguishing 
character to the piece, we must say, that it seems no 
longer possible to ascribe them to the ideal person whose 
name it bears, or to any other than the author himself. — 



I04 CHILD E HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE. 

Lord Byron, we think, has formerly complained of those 
who identified him with his hero, or supposed that Harold 
was but the expositor of his own feelings and opinions ; 
— and in noticing the former portions of the work, we 

5 thought it unbecoming to give any countenance to such 
a supposition. — In this last part, however, it is really 
impracticable to distinguish them. — Not only do the 
author and his hero travel and reflect together, — but, in 
truth, we scarcely ever have any distinct intimation to 

lo which of them the sentiments so energetically expressed 
are to be ascribed ; and in those which are unequivocally 
given as those of the noble author himself, there is the 
very same tone of misanthropy, sadness, and scorn, which 
we were formerly willing to regard as a part of the 

15 assumed costume of the Childe. We are far from sup- 
posing, indeed, that Lord Byron would disavow any of 
these sentiments ; and though there are some which we 
must ever think it most unfortunate to entertain, and 
others which it appears improper to have published, the 

20 greater part are admirable, and cannot be perused with- 
out emotion, even by those to whom they may appear 
erroneous. 



THE EXCURSION. 



Being a Portion of the Recluse, a Poefu. By William Wordsworth. 
4to, pp. 44J. Londoji, 1814.^ 



This will never do ! It bears no doubt the stamp of 
the author's heart and fancy : But unfortunately not half 
so visibly as that of his peculiar system. His former 

1 1 have spoken in many places rather too bitterly and confidently 
of the faults of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry : And forgetting that, 
even on my own view of them, they were but faults of taste, or 
venial self-partiality, have sometimes visited them, I fear, with an 
asperity which should be reserved for objects of Moral reprobation. 
If I were now to deal with the whole question of his poetical merits, 
though my judgment might not be substantially different, I hope I 
should repress the greater part of these vivacites of expression : and 
indeed so strong has been my feeling in this way, that, considering 
how much I have always loved many of the attributes of his Genius, 
and how entirely I respect his Character, it did at first occur to me 
whether it was quite fitting that, in my old age and his, I should 
include in this publication any of those critiques which may have 
formerly given pain or offence, to him or his admirers. But, when 
I reflected that the mischief, if there really ever was any, was long 
ago done, and that I still retain, in substance, the opinions which I 
should now like to have seen more gently expressed, I felt that to 
omit all notice of them on the present occasion, might be held to 
import a retractation which I am as far as possible from intending ; 
or even be represented as a very shabby way of backing out of 
sentiments which should either be manfully persisted in, or openly 
renounced, and abandoned as untenable. 

I finally resolved, therefore, to reprint my review of " The Excur- 
sion " ; which contains a pretty full view of my griefs and charges 
against Mr. Wordsworth ; set forth too, I believe, in a more 



io6 THE EXCURSION. 

poems were intended to recommend that system, and to 
bespeak favour for it by their individual merit ; — but 
this, we suspect, must be recommended by the system — 
and can only expect to succeed where it has been 
5 previously established. It is longer, weaker, and tamer, 

temperate strain than most of my other inculpations, — and of 
which I think I may now venture to say farther that if the faults are 
unsparingly noted, the beauties are not penuriously or grudgingly 
allowed ; but commended to the admiration of the reader with at 
least as much heartiness and good-will. 

But I have also reprinted a short paper on the same author's 
" White Doe of Rylstone," — in which there certainly is no praise, 
or notice of beauties, to set against the very unqualified censures of 
which it is wholly made up. I have done this, however, not merely 
because I adhere to these censures, but chiefly because it seemed 
necessary to bring me fairly to issue with those who may not concur 
in them. I can easily understand that many whose admiration of the 
Excursion, or the Lyrical Ballads, rests substantially on the passages 
which I too should join in admiring, may view with greater indul- 
gence than I can do, the tedious and flat passages with which they 
are interspersed, and may consequently think my censure of these 
works a great deal too harsh and uncharitable. Between such 
persons and me, therefore, there may be no radical difference of 
opinion, or contrariety as to piinciples of judgment. But if there 
be any who actually admire this White Doe of Rylstone, or Peter 
Bell the Waggoner, or the Lamentations of Martha Rae, or the 
Sonnets on the Punishment of Death, there can be no such 
ambiguity, or means of reconcilement. Now I have been assured 
not only that there are such persons, but that almost all those who 
seek to exalt Mr. Wordsworth as the founder of a new school of 
poetry, consider these as by far his best and most characteristic 
productions ; and would at once reject from their communion 
any one who did not acknowledge in them the traces of a high 
inspiration. Now I wish it to be understood, that when I speak with 
general intolerance or impatience of the school of Mr. Wordsworth, 
it is to the school holding these tenets, and applying these tests, 
that I refer : and I really do not see how I could better explain the 
grounds of my dissent from their doctrines, than by republishing my 
remaps on this " White Doe." 



THE EXCURSION. 107 

than any of Mr. Wordsworth's other productions ; with 
less boldness of originality, and less even of that 
extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered 
so prettily, in the Lyrical Ballads, between silliness and 
pathos. We have imitations of Cowper, and even of 5 
Milton here ; engrafted on the natural drawl of the 
Lakers — and all diluted into harmony by that profuse 
and irrepressible wordiness which deluges all the blank 
verse of this school of poetry, and lubricates and weakens 
the whole structure of their style. 10 

Though it fairly fills four hundred and twenty good 
quarto pages, without note, vignette, or any sort of 
extraneous assistance, it is stated in the title — with 
something of an imprudent candour — to be but "a 
portion" of a larger work ; and in the preface, where an 15 
attempt is rather unsuccessfully made to explain the 
whole design, it is still more rashly disclosed, that it is 
but "^? part of the seco?id part^ of a long and laborious 
work" — which is to consist of three parts ! 

What Mr. Wordsworth's ideas of length are, we have 20 
no means of accurately judging : But we cannot help 
suspecting that they are liberal, to a degree that will 
alarm the weakness of most modern readers. As far as 
we can gather from the preface, the entire poem — or one 
of them (for we really are not sure whether there is to 25 
be one or two) is of a biographical nature ; and is to 
contain the history of the author's mind, and of the 
origin and progress of his poetical powers, up to the 
period when they were sufficiently matured to qualify 
him for the great work on which he has been so long 30 
employed. Now, the quarto before us contains an 
account of one of his youthful rambles in the vales of 
Cumberland, and occupies precisely the period of three 
days ! So that, by the use of a very powerful calculus^ 



io8 THE EXCURSION. 

some estimate may be formed of the probable extent 
of the entire biography. 

This small specimen, however, and the statements with 
which it is prefaced, have been sufficient to set our minds 
5 at rest in one particular. The case of Mr. Wordsworth, 
we perceive, is now manifestly hopeless ; and we give 
him up as altogether incurable, and beyond the power of 
criticism. We cannot indeed altogether omit taking 
precautions now and then against the spreading of the 

lo malady ; — but for himself, though we shall watch the 
progress of his symptoms as a matter of professional 
curiosity and instruction, we really think it right not to 
harass him any longer with nauseous remedies, — but 
rather to throw in cordials and lenitives, and wait in 

15 patience for the natural termination of the disorder. In 
order to justify this desertion of our patient, however, it 
is proper to state why we despair of the success of a 
more active practice. 

A man who has been for twenty years at work on such 

20 matter as is now before us, and who comes complacently 
forward with a whole quarto of it, after all the admonitions 
he has received, cannot reasonably be expected to " change 
his hand, or check his pride," upon the suggestion of far 
weightier monitors than we can pretend to be. Inveterate 

25 habits must now have given a kind of sanctity to the 
errors of early taste ; and the very powers of which we 
lament the perversion, have probably become incapable 
of any other application. The very quantity, too, that 
he has written, and is at this moment working up for 

30 publication upon the old pattern, makes it almost hopeless 
to look for any change of it. All this is so much 
capital already sunk in the concern ; which must be 
sacrificed if that be abandoned ; and no man likes to give 
up for lost the time and talent and labour which he has 



THE EXCURSION. 109 

embodied in any permanent production. We were not 
previously aware of these obstacles to Mr. Wordsworth's 
conversion ; and, considering the peculiarities of his 
former writings merely as the result of certain wanton 
and capricious experiments on public taste and indul- 5 
gence, conceived it to be our duty to discourage their 
repetition by all the means in our power. We now see 
clearly, however, how the case stands ; — and, making 
up our minds, though with the most sincere pain and 
reluctance, to consider him as finally lost to the good 10 
cause of poetry, shall endeavour to be thankful for the 
occasional gleams of tenderness and beauty which the 
natural force of his imagination and affections must still 
shed over all his productions, — and to which we shall 
ever turn with delight, in spite of the affectation and 15 
mysticism and prolixity, with which they are so abundantly 
contrasted. 

Long habits of seclusion, and an excessive ambition of 
originality, can alone account for the disproportion which 
seems to exist between this author's taste and his genius ; 20 
or for the devotion with which he has sacrificed so many 
precious gifts at the shrine of those paltry idols which he 
has set up for himself among his lakes and his mountains. 
Solitary musings, amidst such scenes, might no doubt be 
expected to nurse up the mind to the majesty of poetical 25 
conception, — ( though it is remarkable, that all the 
greater poets lived, or had lived, in the full current of 
society): — But the collision of equal minds, — the 
admonition of prevailing impressions — seems necessary 
to reduce its redundancies, and repress that tendency to 30 
extravagance or puerility, into which the self-indulgence 
and self-admiration of genius is so apt to be betrayed, 
when it is allowed to wanton, without awe or restraint, in 
the triumph and delight of its own intoxication. That 



no . THE EXCURSION. 

its flights should be graceful and glorious in the eyes of 
men, it seems almost to be necessary that they should be 
made in the consciousness that men's eyes are to behold 
them, — and that the inward transport and vigour by 
5 which they are inspired, should be tempered by an 
occasional reference to what will be thought of them by 
those ultimate dispensers of glory. An habitual and 
general knowledge of the few settled and permanent 
maxims, which form the canon of general taste in all 

lo large and polished societies — a certain tact, which 
informs us at once that many things, which we still love, 
and are moved by in secret, must necessarily be despised 
as childish, or derided as absurd, in all such societies — 
though it will not stand in the place of genius, seems 

15 necessary to the success of its exertions ; and though it 
will never enable any one to produce the higher beauties 
of art, can alone secure the talent which does produce 
them from errors that must render it useless. Those who 
have most of the talent, however, commonly acquire this 

20 knowledge with the greatest facility ; — and if Mr. 
Wordsworth, instead of confining himself almost entirely 
to the society of the dalesmen and cottagers, and little 
children, who form the subjects of his book, had conde- 
scended to mingle a little more with the people that were 

25 to read and judge of it, we cannot help thinking that its 
texture might have been considerably improved : At 
least it appears to us to be absolutely impossible, that 
any one who had lived or mixed familiarly with men of 
literature and ordinary judgment in poetry (of course 

30 we exclude the coadjutors and disciples of his own 
school) could ever have fallen into such gross faults, or 
so long mistaken them for beauties. His first essays we 
looked upon in a good degree as poetical paradoxes, — 
maintained experimentally, in order to display talent, and 



THE EXCURSION. _ in 

court notoriety ; — and so maintained, with no more 
serious belief in their truth, than is usually generated by 
an ingenious and animated defence of other paradoxes. 
But when we find that he has been for twenty years 
exclusively employed upon articles of this very fabric, 5 
and that he has still enough of raw material on hand to 
keep him so employed for twenty years to come, we cannot 
refuse him the justice of believing that he is a sincere 
convert to his own system, and must ascribe the peculi- 
arities of his composition, not to any transient affectation, 10 
or accidental caprice of imagination, but to a settled 
perversity of taste or understanding, which has been 
fostered, if not altogether created by the circumstances 
to which we have alluded. 

The volume before us, if we were to describe it very 15 
shortly, we should characterise as a tissue of moral and 
devotional ravings, in which innumerable changes are 
rung upon a very few simple and familiar ideas : — But 
with such an accompaniment of long words, long sen- 
tences, and unwieldy phrases — and such a hubbub of 20 
strained raptures and fantastical sublimities, that it is 
often difficult for the most skilful and attentive student 
to obtain a glimpse of the author's meaning — and alto- 
gether impossible for an ordinary reader to conjecture 
what he is about. Moral and religious enthusiasm, 25 
though undoubtedly poetical emotions, are at the same 
time but dangerous inspirers of poetry ; nothing being so 
apt to run into interminable dulness or mellifluous ex- 
travagance, without giving the unfortunate author the 
slightest intimation of his danger. His laudable zeal for 30 
the efficacy of his preachments, he very naturally mistakes 
for the ardour of poetical inspiration ; — and, while deal- 
ing out the high words and glowing phrases which are 
so readily supplied by themes of this description, can 



112 THE EXCURSION. 

scarcely avoid believing that he is eminently original and 
impressive : — All sorts of commonplace notions and ex- 
pressions are sanctified in his eyes, by the sublime ends 
for which they are employed ; and the mystical verbiage 
5 of the Methodist pulpit is repeated, till the speaker 
entertains no doubt that he is the chosen organ of divine 
truth and persuasion. But if such be the common hazards 
of seeking inspiration from those potent fountains, it may 
easily be conceived what chance Mr. Wordsworth had of 

10 escaping their enchantment, — with his natural propen- 
sities to wordiness, and his unlucky habit of debasing 
pathos with vulgarity. The fact accordingly is, that in 
this production he is more obscure than a Pindaric poet 
of the seventeenth century ; and more verbose '' than 

15 even himself of yore" ; while the wilfulness with which 
he persists in choosing his examples of intellectual dignity 
and tenderness exclusively from the lowest ranks of 
society, will be sufficiently apparent, from the circum- 
stance of his having thought fit to make his chief pro- 

20 locutor in this poetical dialogue, and chief advocate of 
Providence and Virtue, an old Scotch Pedlar — retired 
indeed from business — but still rambling about in his 
former haunts, and gossiping among his old customers, 
without his pack on his shoulders. The other persons of 

25 the drama are, a retired military chaplain, who has grown 
half an atheist and half a misanthrope — the wife of an 
unprosperous weaver — a servant girl with her natural 
child — a parish pauper, and one or two other personages 
of equal rank and dignity. 

30 The character of the work is decidedly didactic ; and 
more than nine tenths of it are occupied with a species of 
dialogue, or rather a series of long sermons or harangues 
which pass between the pedlar, the author, the old chap- 
lain, and a worthy vicar, who entertains the whole party 



THE EXCURSION. 113 

at dinner on the last day of their excursion. The inci- 
dents which occur in the course of it are as few and trifling 
as can well be imagined ; — and those which the different 
speakers narrate in the course of their discourses, are 
introduced rather to illustrate their arguments or opinions, 5 
than for any interest they are supposed to possess of 
their own, — The doctrine which the work is intended to 
enforce, we are by no means certain that we have dis- 
covered. In so far as«we can collect, however, it seems 
to be neither more nor less than the old familiar one, 10 
that a firm belief in the providence of a wise and benefi- 
cent Being must be our great stay and support under all 
afflictions and perplexities upon earth — and that there 
are indications of his power and goodness in all the 
aspects of the visible universe, whether living or inan- 15 
imate — every part of which should therefore be regarded 
with love and reverence, as exponents of those great 
attributes. We can testify, at least, that these salutary 
and important truths are inculcated at far greater length, 
and with more repetitions, than in any ten volumes of 20 
sermons that we ever perused. It is also maintained, 
with equal conciseness and originality, that there is fre- 
quently much good sense, as well as much enjoyment, in 
the humbler conditions of life ; and that, in spite of great 
vices and abuses, there is a reasonable allowance both of 25 
happiness and goodness in society at large. If there be 
any deeper or more recondite doctrines in Mr. Words- 
worth's book, we must confess that they have escaped 
us ; — and, convinced as we are of the truth and sound- 
ness of those to which we have alluded, we cannot help 3° 
thinking that they might have been better enforced with 
less parade and prolixity. His effusions on what may be 
called the physiognomy of external nature, or its moral 
and theological expression, are eminently fantastic, 



114 THE EXCURSION. 

obscure, and affected. — It is quite time, however, that 
we should give the reader a more particular account of 
this singular performance. 

5 Our abstract of the story has been so extremely concise 
that it is more than usually necessary for us to lay some 
specimens of the work itself before our readers. Its 
grand staple, as we have already said, consists of a kind 
of mystical morality: and the chi^ef characteristics of the 

lo style are, that it is prolix, and very frequently unintelli- 
gible : and though we are sensible that no great gratifi- 
cation is to be expected from the exhibition of those 
qualities, yet it is necessary to give our readers a taste 
of them, both to justify the sentence we have passed, 

15 and to satisfy them that it was really beyond our power 
to present them with any abstract or intelligible account 
of those long conversations which we have had so much 
occasion to notice in our brief sketch of its contents. 
We need give ourselves no trouble, however, to select 

20 passages for this purpose. Here is the first that presents 
itself to us on opening the volume ; and if our readers 
can form the slightest guess at its meaning, we must 
give them credit for a sagacity to which we have no 
pretension. 

25 "But by the storms of circta7istance unshaken, 

And subject neither to eclipse or wane, 
Duty exists ; — immutably survive, 
For our support, the measures and the forms, 
"Which an abstract Intelligence supplies ; 
30 Whose kingdom is, where Time and Space are not : 

Of other converse, which mind, soul, and heart, 
Do, with united urgency, require, 
What more, that may not perish ? " 

" 'T is, by comparison, an easy task 
35 Earth to despise ; but to converse with Heav'n, 



THE EXCURSION. iiS 

This is not easy : — to relinquish all 

We have, or hope, of happiness and joy, — 

And stand in freedom loosen'd from this world ; 

I deem not arduous ! — but must needs confess 

That 't is a thing impossible to frame 5 

Conceptions equal to the Soul's desires." — pp. 144-147. 

This is a fair sample of that rapturous mysticism which 
eludes all comprehension, and fills the despairing reader 
with painful giddiness and terror. The following, which 
we meet with on the very next page, is in the same 10 
general strain : — though the first part of it affords a 
good specimen of the author's talent for enveloping a 
plain and trite observation in all the mock majesty of 
solemn verbosity. A reader of plain understanding, we 
suspect, could hardly recognize the familiar remark, that 15 
excessive grief for our departed friends is not very con- 
sistent with a firm belief in their immortal felicity, in 
the first twenty lines of the following passage : — In the 
succeeding lines we do not ourselves pretend to recognize 
anything. 20 

These examples, we perceive, are not very well chosen 
— but we have not leisure to improve the selection; and, 
such as they are, they may serve to give the reader a 
notion of the sort of merit which we meant to illustrate 25 
by their citation. When we look back to them, indeed, 
and to the other passages which we have now extracted, 
we feel half inclined to rescind the severe sentence which 
we passed on the work at the beginning : — But when we 
look into the work itself, we perceive that it cannot be 3° 
rescinded. Nobody can be more disposed to do justice 
to the great powers of Mr. Wordsworth than we are ; 
and, from the first time that he came before us, down 
to the present moment, we have uniformly testified in 



ii6 THE EXCURSION. 

their favour, and assigned indeed our high sense of their 
value as the chief ground of the bitterness with which 
we resented their perversion. That perversion, however, 
is now far more visible than their original dignity ; and 

5 while we collect the fragments, it is impossible not to 
mourn over the ruins from which we are condemned to 
pick them. If any one should doubt of the existence of 
such a perversion, or be disposed to dispute about the 
instances we have hastily brought forward, we would just 

lo beg leave to refer him to the general plan and character 
of the poem now before us. Why should Mr. Wordsworth 
have made his hero a superannuated pedlar ? What but 
the most wretched affectation, or provoking perversity of 
taste, could induce any one to place his chosen advocate 

15 of wisdom and virtue in so absurd and fantastic a con- 
dition ? Did Mr. Wordsworth really imagine that his 
favorite doctrines were likely to gain anything in point 
of effect or authority by being put into the mouth of a 
person accustomed to higgle about tape or brass sleeve- 

20 buttons .? Or is it not plain that, independent of the 
ridicule and disgust which such a personification must 
excite in many of his readers, its adoption exposes his 
work throughout to the charge of revolting incongruity 
and utter disregard of probability or nature ? For, after 

25 he has thus wilfully debased his moral teacher by a low 
occupation, is there one word that he puts into his mouth, 
or one sentiment of which he makes him the organ, that 
has the most remote reference to that occupation? Is 
there anything in his learned, abstract and logical 

30 harangues that savours of the calling that is ascribed to 
him ? Are any of their materials such as a pedlar could 
possibly have dealt in ? Are the manners, the diction, 
the sentiments in any, the very smallest degree, accom- 
modated to a person in that, condition ? or are they not 



THE EXCURSION. 117 

eminently and conspicuously such as could not by possi- 
bility belong to it? A man who went about selHng 
flannel and pocket-handkerchiefs' in this lofty diction 
would soon frighten away all his customers ; and would 
infallibly pass either for a madman or for some learned 5 
and affected gentleman, who, in a frolic, had taken up 
a character which he was peculiarly ill qualified for 
supporting. 

The absurdity in this case, we think, is palpable and 
glaring : but it is exactly of the same nature with that 10 
which infects the whole substance of the work — a puerile 
ambition of singularity engrafted on an unlucky predilec- 
tion for truisms ; and an affected passion for simplicity 
and humble life, most awkwardly combined with a taste 
for mystical refinements, and all the gorgeousness of 15 
obscure phraseology. His taste for simplicity is evinced 
by sprinkling up and down his interminable declamations 
a few descriptions of baby-houses, and of old hats with 
wet brims ; and his amiable partiality for humble life, 
by assuring us that a wordy rhetorician, who talks about 20 
Thebes, and allegorizes all the heathen mythology, was 
once a pedlar — and making him break in upon his 
magnificent orations with two or three awkward notices 
of something that he had seen when selling winter raiment 
about the country — or of the changes in the state of 25 
society, which had almost annihilated his former calling. 



THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE, 

OR THE FATE OF THE NORTONS. 



A Poem. By William Wordsworth. 4to, pp. 162. LondAi, j8ij. 



This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst 
poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume ; and 
though it was scarcely to be expected, we confess, that 
Mr. Wordsworth, with all his ambition, should so soon 
5 have attained to that distinction, the wonder may perhaps 
be diminished when we state that it seems to us to con- 
sist of a happy union of all the faults, without any of 
the beauties, which belong to his school of poetry. It 
is just such a work, in short, as some wicked enemy of 

10 that school might be supposed to have devised, on purpose 
to make it ridiculous ; and when we first took it up we 
could not help suspecting that some ill-natured critic had 
actually taken this harsh method of instructing Mr. Words- 
worth, by example, in the nature of those errors, against 

15 which our precepts had been so often directed in vain. 
We had not gone far, however, till we felt intimately that 
nothing in the nature of a joke could be so insupportably 
dull ; — and that this must be the work of one who earn- 
estly believed it to be a pattern of pathetic simplicity, 

20 and gave it out as such to the admiration of all intelligent 
readers. In this point of view the work may be regarded 
as curious at least, if not in some degree interesting ; 
and, at all events, it must be instructive to be made 
aware of the excesses into which superior understand- 

25 ings may be betrayed, by long self-indulgence, and tbe 



THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE. 119 

Strange extravagances into which they may run, when 
under the influence of that intoxication which is produced 
by unrestrained admiration of themselves. This poetical 
intoxication, indeed, to pursue the figure a little farther, 
seems capable of assuming as many forms as the vulgar 5 
one which arises from wine ; and it appears to require as 
delicate a management to make a man a good poet by 
the help of the one as to make him a good companion 
by means of the other. In both cases, a little mistake 
as to the dose or the quality of the inspiring fluid may 10 
make him absolutely outrageous, or lull him over into 
the most profound stupidity, instead of brightening up 
the hidden stores of his genius : and truly we are con- 
cerned to say that Mr. Wordsworth seems hitherto to 
have been unlucky in the choice of his liquor — or of 15 
his bottle-holder. In some of his odes and ethic exhor- 
tations he was exposed to the public in a state of inco- 
herent rapture and glorious delirium, to which we think 
we have seen a parallel among the humbler lovers of 
jollity. In the Lyrical Ballads he was exhibited, on the 20 
whole, in a vein of very pretty deliration ; but in the 
poem before us he appears in a state of low and maudlin 
imbecility, which would not have misbecome Master 
Silence himself, in the close of a social day. Whether 
this unhappy result is to be ascribed to any adulteration 25 
of his Castalian cups, or to the unlucky choice of his 
company over them, we cannot presume to say. It may 
be that he has dashed his Hippocrene with too large 
an infusion of lake water, or assisted its operation too 
exclusively by the study of the ancient historical ballads 3° 
of " the north countrie." That there are palpable imita- 
tions of the style and manner of those venerable compo- 
sitions in the work before us is indeed undeniable ; 
but it unfortunately happens that while the hobbling 



I20 THE WHITE DOE OF RYLSTONE. 

versification, the mean diction and flat stupidity of these 
models are very exactly copied, and even improved upon, 
in this imitation, their rude energy, manly simplicity, and 
occasional felicity of expression have totally disappeared; 
and, instead of them, a large allowance of the author's 
own metaphysical sensibility, and mystical wordiness is 
forced into an unnatural combination with the borrowed 
beauties which have just been mentioned. 



TALES OF FASHIONABLE LIFE. 



By Miss Edgeworth, Author of ^^ Practical Ediicatiojt,''^ ^'■Belinda" 
" Castle Rackrent" etc. i27no. j vols. London, i8og. 



If it were possible for reviewers to Envy the authors 
who are brought before them for judgment, we rather 
think we should be tempted to envy Miss Edgeworth ; — 
not, however, so much for her matchless powers of 
probable invention — her never-failing good sense and c 
cheerfulness — nor her fine discrimination of characters 
— as for the delightful consciousness of having done 
more good than any other writer, male or female, of her 
generation. Other arts and sciences have their use, no 
doubt ; and, Heaven knows, they have their reward and lo 
their fame. But the great art is the art of living ; and 
the chief science the science of being happy. Where 
there is an absolute deficiency of good sense, these 
cannot indeed be taught ; and, with an extraordinary 
share of it, they may be acquired without an instructor : 15 
but the most common case is, to be capable of learning, 
and yet to require teaching ; and a far greater part of 
the misery which exists in society arises from ignorance, 
than either from vice or from incapacity. 

Miss Edgeworth is the great modern mistress in this 20 
school of true philosophy ; and has eclipsed, we think, 
the fame of all her predecessors. By her many excellent 
tracts on education, she has conferred a benefit on the 
whole mass of the population ; and discharged, with 
exemplary patience as well as extraordinary judgment, a 25 
task which superficial spirits may perhaps mistake for an 



122 TALES OF FASHIONABLE LIFE. 

humble and easy one. By her Popular Tales, she has 
rendered an invaluable service to the middling and lower 
orders of the people ; and by her Novels, and by the 
volumes before us, has made a great and meritorious 
5 effort to promote the happiness and respectability of the 
higher classes. On a former occasion we believe we 
hinted to her, that these would probably be the least 
successful of all her labours ; and that it was doubtful 
whether she could be justified for bestowing so much of 

10 her time on the case of a few persons, who scarcely 
deserved to be cured, and were scarcely capable of being 
corrected. The foolish and unhappy part of the fashion- 
able world, for the most part, "is not fit to hear itself 
convinced." It is too vain, too busy, and too dissipated 

15 to listen to, or remember any thing that is said to it. 
Every thing serious it repels, by "its dear wit and gay 
rhetoric"; and against every thing poignant, it seeks 
shelter in the impenetrable armour of its conjunct au- 
dacity. 

20 " Laugh'd at, it laughs again ; — and, stricken hard, 

Turns to the stroke its adamantine scales, 
That fear no discipline of human hands." 

A book, on the other hand, and especially a witty and 
popular book, is still a thing of consequence, to such of 

25 the middling classes of society as are in the habit of 
reading. They dispute about it, and think of it ; and as 
they occasionally make themselves ridiculous by copying 
the manners it displays, so they are apt to be impressed 
with the great lessons it may be calculated to teach ; 

30 and, on the whole, receive it into considerable authority 
among the regulators of their lives and opinions. — But a 
fashionable person has scarcely any leisure to read ; and 
none to think of what he has been reading. It would be 
a derogation from his dignity to speak of a book in any 



TALES OF FASHIONABLE LIFE. 123 

terms but those of frivolous derision ; and a strange 
desertion of his own superiority, to allow himself to 
receive, from its perusal, any impressions which could at 
all aifect his conduct or opinions. 

But though, for these reasons, we continue to think 5 
that Miss Edgeworth's fashionable patients will do less 
credit to her prescriptions than the more numerous 
classes to whom they might have been directed, we admit 
that her plan of treatment is in the highest degree 
judicious, and her conception of the disorder most 10 
luminous and precise. 

There are two great sources of unhappiness to those 
whom fortune and nature seem to have placed above the 
reach of ordinary miseries. The one is eimui — that 
stagnation of life and feeling which results from the 15 
absence of all motives to exertion ; and by which the 
justice of providence has so fully compensated the 
partiality of fortune, that it may be fairly doubted 
whether, upon the whole, the race of beggars is not 
happier than the race of lords ; and whether those vulgar 20 
wants that are sometimes so importunate, are not, in this 
world, the chief ministers of enjoyment. This is a plague 
that infects all indolent persons who can live on in the 
rank in which they were born, without the necessity of 
working : but, in a free country, it rarely occurs in any 25 
great degree of virulence, except among those who are 
already at the summit of human felicity. Below this, 
there is room for ambition, and envy, and emulation, 
and all the feverish movements of aspiring vanity and 
unresting selfishness, which act as prophylactics against 3° 
this more dark and deadly distemper. It is the canker 
which corrodes the full-blown flower of human felicity — 
the pestilence which smites at the bright hour of 
noon. 



124 TALES OF FASHIONABLE LIFE. 

The other curse of the happy, has a range more wide 
and indiscriminate. It, too, tortures only the compara- 
tively rich and fortunate ; but is most active among the 
least distinguished ; and abates in malignity as we ascend 
5 to the lofty regions of pure e?iiiui. This is the desire of 
being fashionable ;■ — the restless and insatiable passion 
to pass for creatures a little more distinguished than we 
really are — with the mortification of frequent failure, 
and the humiliating consciousness of being perpetually 

lo exposed to it. Among those who are secure of "meat, 
clothes, and fire," and are thus above the chief physical 
evils of existence, we do believe that this is a more 
prolific source of unhappiness, than guilt, disease, or 
wounded affection ; and that more positive misery is 

15 created, and more true enjoyment excluded, by the 
eternal fretting and straining of this pitiful ambition, than 
by all the ravages of passion, the desolations of war, or 
the accidents of mortality. This may appear a strong 
statement ; but we make it deliberately, and are deeply 

20 convinced of its truth. The wretchedness which it pro- 
duces may not be so intense ; but it is of much longer 
duration, and spreads over a far wider circle. It is quite 
dreadful, indeed, to think what a sweep this pest has 
taken among the comforts of our prosperous population. 

25 To be thought fashionable — that is, to be thought 
more opulent and tasteful, and on a footing of intimacy 
with a greater number of distinguished persons than 
they really are, is the great and laborious pursuit of 
four families out of five, the members of which are 

30 exempted from the necessity of daily industry. In this 
pursuit, their time, spirits, and talents are wasted ; their 
tempers, soured ; their affections palsied ; and their 
natural manners and dispositions altogether sophisticated 
and lost. 



TALES OF FASHIONABLE LIFE. 125 

These are the giant curses of fashionable life, and 
Miss Edgeworth has accordingly dedicated her two best 
tales to the delineation of their symptoms. The history 
of "Lord Glenthorn" is a fine picture of ennui — that of 
" Almeria " an instructive representation of the miseries 5 
of aspirations after fashion. We do not know whether it 
was a part of the fair writer's design to represent these 
maladies as absolutely incurable, without a change of 
condition ; but the fact is, that in spite of the best dis- 
positions and capacities, and the most powerful induce- 10 
ments to action, the hero of e?inui makes no advances 
towards amendment, till he is deprived of his title and 
estate ! and the victim of fashion is left, at the end of 
the tale, pursuing her weary career, with fading hopes 
and wasted spirits, but with increased anxiety and per- 15 
severance. The moral use of these narratives, therefore, 
must consist in warning us against the first approaches of 
evils which can never afterwards be resisted. 



WAVERLEY, OR 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 



In three volumes ismo, pp. 1112. Third edition. Edinburgh, 1814.* 



It is wonderful what genius and adherence to nature 
will do, in spite of all disadvantages. Here is a thing 
obviously very hastily, and, in many places, somewhat 
unskilfully written — composed, one half of it, in a 
5 dialect unintelligible to four-fifths of the reading popula- 
tion of the country — relating to a period too recent to 

* I have been a good deal at a loss what to do with these famous 
novels of Sir Walter. On the one hand, I could not bring myself 
to let this collection go forth, without some notice of works which, 
for many years together, had occupied and delighted me more than 
anything else that ever came under my critical survey : While, on 
the other, I could not but feel that it would be absurd, and in some 
sense almost dishonest, to fill these pages with long citations from 
books which, for the last twenty-five years, have been in the hands 
of at least fifty times as many readers as are ever likely to look into 
this publication — and are still as familiar to the generation which 
has last come into existence, as to those who can yet remember the 
sensation produced by their first appearance. In point of fact I was 
informed, but the other day, by Mr. Cadell, that he had actually 
sold not less than sixty thousand volumes of these extraordinary 
productions, in the course of the preceding year ! and that the 
demand for them, instead of slackening — had been for some time 
sensibly on the increase. In these circumstances I think I may 
safely assume that their contents are still so perfectly known as not 
to require any citations to introduce such of the remarks originally 
made on them as I may now wish to repeat. And I have therefore 
come to the determination of omitting almost all the quotations, 
and most of the detailed abstracts which appeared in the original 



WAVERLEY, OR 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 127 

be romantic, and too far gone by to be familiar — and 
published, moreover, in'^a quarter of the island where 
materials and talents for novel-writing have been sup- 
posed to be equally wanting : And yet, by the mere force 
and truth and vivacity of its colouring, already casting 5 
the whole tribe of ordinary novels into the shade, and 
taking its place rather with the most popular of our 
modern poems, than with the rubbish of provincial 
romances. 

The secret of this success, we take it, is merely that 10 
the author is a man of Genius ; and that he has, notwith- 
standing, had virtue enough to be true to Nature through- 
out ; and to content himself, even in the marvellous parts 
of his story, with copying from actual existences, rather 
than from the phantasms of his own imagination. The 15 
charm which this communicates to all works that deal in 

reviews ; and to retain only the general criticism, and character, or 
estimate of each performance — together with such incidental obser- 
vations as may have been suggested by the tenor or success of these 
wonderful productions. By this course, no doubt, a sad shrinking 
will be effected in the primitive dimensions of the articles which are 
here reproduced ; and may probably give to what is retained some- 
thing of a naked and jejune appearance. If it should be so, I can 
only say that I do not see how I could have helped it : and after all 
it may not be altogether without interest to see, from a contem- 
porary record, what were the first impressions produced by the 
appearance of this new luminary on our horizon ; while the secret 
of the authorship was yet undivulged, and before the rapid accumu- 
lation of its glories had forced on the dullest spectator a sense of its 
magnitude and power. I may venture perhaps also to add, that 
some of the general speculations of which these reviews suggested 
the occasion, may probably be found as well worth preserving as 
most of those which have been elsewhere embodied in this experi- 
mental, and somewhat hazardous, publication. 

Though living in familiar intercourse with Sir Walter, I need 
scarcely say that I was not in the secret of his authorship ; and in 
truth had no assurance of the fact, till the time of its promulgation. 



128 WAVE RLE Y, OR 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. ■ 

the representation of human actions and character, is 
more readily felt than understood ; and operates with 
unfailing efficacy even upon those who have no acquaint- 
ance with the originals from which the picture has been 
5 borrowed. It requires no ordinary talent, indeed, to 
choose such realities as may outshine the bright imagina- 
tions of the inventive, and so to combine them as to 
produce the most advantageous effect ; but when this is 
once accomplished, the result is sure to be something 

lo more firm, impressive, and engaging, than can ever be 
produced by mere fiction. 

The object of the work before us, was evidently to 
present a faithful and animated picture of the manners 
and state of society that prevailed in this northern part 

15 of the island, in the earlier part of last century; and the 
author has judiciously fixed upon the era of the Rebellion 
in 1745, not only as enriching his pages with the interest 
inseparably attached to the narration of such occurrences, 
but as affording a fair opportunity for bringing out all the 

20 contrasted principles and habits which distinguished the 
different classes of persons who then divided the country, 
and formed among them the basis of almost all that was 
peculiar in the national character. That unfortunate 
contention brought conspicuously to light, and, for the 

25 last time, the fading image of feudal chivalry in the 
mountains, and vulgar fanaticism in the plains ; and 
startled the more polished parts of the land with the wild 
but brilliant picture of the devoted valour, incorruptible 
fidelity, patriarchal brotherhood, and savage habits of the 

30 Celtic Clans, on the one hand, — and the dark, intract- 
able, and domineering bigotry of the Covenanters on the 
other. Both aspects of society had indeed been formerly 
prevalent in other parts of the country, — but had there 
been so long superseded by more peaceable habits, and 



1 



WAVE RLE Y, OR 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 129 

milder manners, that their vestiges were ahnost effaced, 
and their very memory nearly extinguished. The feudal 
principalities had been destroyed in the South, for near 
three hundred years, — and the dominion of the Puritans 
from the time of the Restoration. When the glens, and 5 
banded clans, of the central Highlands, therefore, were 
opened up to the gaze of the English, in the course of 
that insurrection, it seemed as if they were carried back 
to the days of the Heptarchy ; — and when they saw the 
array of the West country Whigs, they might imagine 10 
themselves transported to the age of Cromwell. The 
effect, indeed, is almost as startling at the present mo- 
ment; and one great source of the interest which the 
volumes before us undoubtedly possess, is to be sought 
in the surprise that is excited by discovering, that in our 15 
own country, and almost in our own age, manners and 
characters existed, and were conspicuous, which we had 
been accustomed to consider as belonging to remote 
antiquity, or extravagant romance. 

The way in which they are here represented must 20 
satisfy every reader, we think, by an inward tact and 
conviction, that the delineation has been made from 
actual experience and observation ; — experience and 
observation employed perhaps only on a few surviving 
relics and specimens of what was familiar a little earlier 25 
— but generalised from instances sufficiently numerous 
and complete, to warrant all that may have been added 
to the portrait : — And, indeed, the existing records and 
vestiges of the more extraordinary parts of the represen- 
tation are still sufficiently abundant, to satisfy all who 30 
have the means of consulting them, as to the perfect 
accuracy of the picture. The great traits of Clannish 
dependence, pride, and fidelity, may still be detected in 
many districts of the Highlands, though they do not now 



130 WAVER LEY, OR 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 

adhere to the chieftains when they mingle in general 
society ; and the existing contentions of Burghers and 
Antiburghers, and Cameronians, though shrunk into com- 
parative insignificance, and left, indeed, without protec- 

5 tion to the ridicule of the profane, may still be referred 
to, as complete verifications of all that is here stated 
about Gifted Gilfillan, or Ebenezer Cruickshank. The 
traits of Scottish national character in the lower ranks, 
can still less be regarded as antiquated or traditional ; 

10 nor is there any thing in the whole compass of the work 
which gives us a stronger impression of the nice observa- 
tion and graphical talent of the author, than the extra- 
ordinary fidelity and felicity with which all the inferior 
agents in the story are represented. No one who has not 

15 lived extensively among the lower orders of all descrip- 
tions, and made himself familiar with their various tem- 
pers and dialects, can perceive the full merit of those 
rapid and characteristic sketches ; but it requires only a 
general knowledge of human nature, to feel that they 

20 must be faithful copies from known originals ; and to be 
aware of the extraordinary facility and flexibility of hand 
which has touched, for instance, with such discriminating 
shades, the various gradations of the Celtic character, 
from the savage imperturbability of Dugald Mahony, who 

25 stalks grimly about with his battle-axe on his shoulder, 
without speaking a word to any one, — to the lively un- 
principled activity of Galium Beg, — the coarse unreflect- 
ing hardihood and heroism of Evan Maccombich, — and 
the pride, gallantry, elegance, and ambition of Fergus 

30 himself. In the lower class of the Lowland characters, 
again, the vulgarity of Mrs. Flockhart and of Lieutenant 
Jinker is perfectly distinct and original ; — as well as the 
puritanism of Gilfillan and Cruickshank — the atrocity of 
Mrs. Mucklewrath — and the slow solemnity of Alexander 



W AVE RLE Y, OR 'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE. 131 

Saunderson. The Baron of Bradwardine, and Baillie 
Macwheeble, are caricatures no doubt, after the fashion 
of the caricatures in the novels of Smollett, — or pictures, 
at the best, of individuals who must always have been 
unique and extraordinary : but almost all the other per- 5 
sonages in the history are fair representatives of classes 
that are still existing, or may be remembered at least to 
have existed, by many whose recollections do not extend 
quite so far back as to the year 1745. 

^ "" ^ 10 

There has been much speculation, at least in this 
quarter of the island, about the authorship of this singular 
performance — and certainly it is not easy to conjecture 
why it is still anonymous. — Judging by internal evidence, 
to which alone we pretend to have access, we should not 15 
scruple to ascribe it to the highest of those authors to 
whom it has been assigned by the sagacious conjectures 
of the public ; — and this at least we will venture to 
say that if it be indeed the work of an author hitherto 
unknown, Mr. Scott would do well to look to his laurels, 20 
and to rouse himself for a sturdier competition than any 
he has yet had to encounter ! 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 



Collected and arranged by Jedediah Cleishbotham, Schoolmaster and 
Parish Clerk of the Parish of Gandercleugh. 4 vols. rsmo. 
Edinburgh, 1816. 

This, we think, is beyond all question a new coinage 
from the mint which produced Waverley, Guy Manner- 
ing, and the Antiquary : — For though it does not bear 
the legend and superscription of the Master on the face 

5 of the pieces, there is no mistaking either the quality of 
the metal or the execution of the die — and even the 
private mark, we doubt not, may be seen plain enough, 
by those who know how to look for it. It is quite 
impossible to read ten pages of this work, in short, 

10 without feeling that it belongs to the same school with 
those very remarkable productions ; and no one who has 
any knowledge of nature, or of art, will ever doubt that it 
is an original. The very identity of the leading char- 
acters in the whole set of stories, is a stronger proof, 

15 perhaps, that those of the last series are not copied from 
the former, than even the freshness and freedom of the 
draperies with which they are now invested — or the ease 
and spirit of the new groups into which they are here 
combined. No imitator would have ventured so near his 

20 originals, and yet come off so entirely clear of them : 
And we are only the more assured that the old acquaint- 
ances we continually recognise in these volumes, are 
really the persons they pretend to be, and no false 
mimics, that we recollect so perfectly to have seen them 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 133 

before, — or at least to have been familiar with some of 
their near relations ! 

We have often been astonished at the quantity of 
talent — of invention, observation, and knowledge of char- 
acter, as well as of spirited and graceful composition, 5 
that may be found in those works of fiction in our lan- 
guage, which are generally regarded as among the lower 
productions of our literature, — upon which no great 
pains is understood to be bestowed, and which are 
seldom regarded as titles to a permanent reputation. If 10 
Novels, however, are not fated to last as long as Epic 
poems, they are at least a great deal more popular in 
their season ; and, slight as their structure, and imperfect 
as their finishing may often be thought in comparison, we 
have no hesitation in saying, that the better specimens of 15 
the art are incomparably more entertaining, and consider- 
ably more instructive. The great objection to them, 
indeed, is, that they are too entertaining — and are so 
pleasant in the reading, as to be apt to produce a disrelish 
for other kinds of reading, which may be more necessary, 20 
and can in no way be made so agreeable. Neither 
science, nor authentic history, nor political nor pro- 
fessional instruction, can be rightly conveyed, we fear, in 
a pleasant tale ; and therefore, all those things are in 
danger of appearing dull and uninteresting to the votaries 25 
of these more seductive studies. Among the most popular 
of these popular productions that have appeared in our 
times, we must rank the works to which we just alluded ; 
and we do not hesitate to say, that they are well entitled 
to that distinction. They are indeed, in many respects, 3° 
very extraordinary performances — though in nothing 
more extraordinary than in having remained so long 
unclaimed. There is no name, we think, in our litera- 
ture, to which they would not add lustre — and lustre, 



134 TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

too, of a very enviable kind ; for they not only show great 
talent, but infinite good sense and good nature, — a more 
vigorous and wide-reaching intellect than is often dis- 
played in novels, and a more powerful fancy, and a 

5 deeper sympathy with various passion, than is often com- 
bined with such strength of understanding. 

The author, whoever he is, has a truly graphic and 
creative power in the invention and delineation of char- 
acters — which he sketches with an ease, and colours 

lo with a brilliancy, and scatters about with a profusion, 
which reminds us of Shakespeare himself : Yet with all 
this force and felicity in the representation of living 
agents, he has the eye of a poet for all the striking aspects 
external of nature ; and usually contrives, both in his 

15 scenery and in the groups with which it is enlivened, to 
combine the picturesque with the natural, with a grace 
that has rarely been attained by artists so copious and 
rapid. His narrative, in this way, is kept constantly full 
of life, variety, and colour ; and is so interspersed with 

20 glowing descriptions, and lively allusions, and flying 
traits of sagacity and pathos, as not only to keep our 
attention continually awake, but to afford a pleasing exer- 
cise to most of our other faculties. The prevailing tone 
is very gay and pleasant ; but the author's most remark- 

25 able, and, perhaps, his most delightful talent, is that of 
representing kindness of heart in union with lightness of 
spirits and great simplicity of character, and of blending 
the expression of warm and generous and exalted affec- 
tions with scenes and persons that are in themselves both 

30 lowly and ludicrous. This gift he shares with his illus- 
trious countryman Burns — as he does many of the other 
qualities we have mentioned with another living poet, — 
who is only inferior perhaps in that to which we have last 
alluded. It is very honorable indeed, we think, both to 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 135 

the author, and to the readers among whom he is so 
extremely popular, that the great interest of his pieces is 
for the most part a Moral interest — that the concern we 
take in his favourite characters is less on account of their 
adventures than of their amiableness — and that the great 5 
charm of his works is derived from the kindness of heart, 
the capacity of generous emotions, and the lights of 
native taste which he ascribes, so lavishly, and at the 
same time with such an air of truth and familiarity, even 
to the humblest of these favourites. With all his relish 10 
for the ridiculous, accordingly, there is no tone of misan- 
thropy, or even of sarcasm, in his representations ; but, 
on the contrary, a great indulgence and relenting even 
towards those who are to be the objects of our disappro- 
bation. There is no keen or cold-blooded satire — no 15 
bitterness of heart, or fierceness of resentment, in any 
part of his writings. His love of ridicule is little else 
than a love of mirth ; and savours throughout of the 
joyous temperament in which it appears to have its 
origin ; while the buoyancy of a raised and poetical 20 
imagination lifts him continually above the region of 
mere jollity and good humour, to which a taste, by no 
means nice or fastidious, might otherwise be in danger of 
sinking him. He is evidently a person of a very sociable 
and liberal spirit — with great habits of observation — 25 
who has ranged pretty extensively through the varieties 
of human life and character, and mingled with them all, 
not only with intelligent familiarity, but with a free and 
natural sympathy for all the diversities of their tastes, 
pleasures, and pursuits — one who has kept his heart as 3° 
well as his eyes open to all that has offered itself to 
engage them ; and learned indulgence for human faults 
and follies, not only from finding kindred faults in their 
most intolerant censors, but also for the sake of the 



136 TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

virtues by which they are often redeemed, and the suffer- 
ings by which they have still oftener been chastised. 
The temper of his writings, in short, is precisely the 
reverse of those of our Laureates and Lakers, who, being 
5 themselves the most whimsical of mortals, make it a con- 
science to loathe and abhor all with whom they happen 
to disagree ; and labour to promote mutual animosity 
and all manner of uncharitableness among mankind, by 
referring every supposed error of taste, or peculiarity of 

10 opinion, to some hateful corruption of the heart and 
understanding. 

With all the indulgence, however, which we so justly 
ascribe to him, we are far from complaining of the writer 
before us for being too neutral and undecided on the 

15 great subjects which are most apt to engender excessive 
zeal and intolerance — and we are almost as far from 
agreeing with him as to most of those subjects. In 
politics it is sufficiently manifest, that he is a decided 
Tory — and, we are afraid, something of a latitudinarian 

20 both in morals and religion. He is very apt at least to 
make a mock of all enthusiasm for liberty or faith — and 
not only gives a decided preference to the social over the 
austerer virtues — but seldom expresses any warm or 
hearty admiration, except for those graceful and gentle- 

25 man-like principles, which can generally be acted upon 
with a gay countenance — and do not imply any great 
effort of self-denial, or any deep sense of the rights of 
others, or the helplessness and humility of our common 
nature. Unless we misconstrue very grossly the indica- 

30 tions in these volumes, the author thinks no times so 
happy as those in which an indulgent monarch awards a 
reasonable portion of liberty to grateful subjects, who do 
not call in question his right either to give or to withhold 
it — in which a dignified and decent hierarchy receives 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 137 

the homage of their submissive and uninquiring flocks — 
and a gallant nobility redeems the venial immoralities 
of their gayer hours, by brave and honourable conduct 
towards each other, and spontaneous kindness to vassals, 
in whom they recognise no independent rights, and not 5 
many features of a common nature. 

It is very remarkable, however, that, with propensities 
thus decidedly aristocratical, the ingenious author has 
succeeded by far the best in the representation of rustic 
and homely characters ; and not in the ludicrous or con- 10 
temptuous representation of them — but by making them 
at once more natural and more interesting than they had 
ever been made before in any work of fiction ; by showing 
them, not as clowns to be laughed at — or wretches, to be 
pitied and despised — but as human creatures, with as 15 
many pleasures and fewer cares than their superiors — 
with affections not only as strong, but often as delicate 
as those whose language is smoother — and with a vein 
of humour, a force of sagacity, and very frequently an 
elevation of fancy, as high and as natural as can be met 20 
with among more cultivated beings. The great merit of 
all these delineations, is their admirable truth and fidelity 
— the whole manner and cast of the characters being 
accurately moulded on their condition — and the finer 
attributes that are ascribed to them so blended and 25 
harmonised with the native rudeness and simplicity of • 
their life and occupations, that they are made interesting 
and even noble beings, without the least particle of 
foppery or exaggeration, and delight and amuse us, 
without trespassing at all on the province of pastoral 30 
or romance. 

Next to these, we think, he has found his happiest 
subjects, or at least displayed his greatest powers, in the 
delineation of the grand and gloomy aspects of nature, 



138 TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

and of the dark and fierce passions of the heart. The 
natural gaiety of his temper does not indeed allow him 
to dwell long on such themes ; — but the sketches he 
occasionally introduces, are executed with admirable 
5 force and spirit — and give a strong impression both 
of the vigour of his imagination, and the variety of his 
talent. It is only in the third rank that we would place 
his pictures of chivalry and chivalrous character — his 
traits of gallantry, nobleness, and honour — and that 

10 bewitching combination of gay and gentle manners, with 
generosity, candour, and courage, which has long been 
familiar enough to readers and writers of novels, but has 
never before been represented with such an air of truth, 
and so much ease and happiness of execution. 

15 Among his faults and failures, we must give the first 
place to his descriptions of virtuous young ladies — and 
his representations of the ordinary business of courtship 
and conversation in polished life. We admit that those 
things, as they are commonly conducted in real life, are 

20 apt to be a little insipid to a mere critical spectator ; — 
and that while they consequently require more heighten- 
ing than strange adventures or grotesque persons, they 
admit less of exaggeration or ambitious ornament : — 
Yet we cannot think it necessary that they should be 

25 altogether so tame and mawkish as we generally find 
them in the hands of this spirited writer, — whose powers 
really seem to require some stronger stimulus to bring 
them into action, than can be supplied by the flat 
realities of a peaceful and ordinary existence. His love 

30 of the ludicrous, it must also be observed, often betrays 
him into forced and vulgar exaggerations, and into the 
repetition of common and paltry stories, — though it is 
but fair to add, that he does not detain us long with 
them, and makes amends by the copiousness of his 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 139 

assortment for the indifferent quality of some of the 
specimens. It is another consequence of this extreme 
abundance in which he revels and riots, and of the 
fertility of the imagination from which it is supplied, that 
he is at all times a little apt to overdo even those things 5 
which he does best. His most striking and highly 
coloured characters appear rather too often, and go on 
rather too long. It is astonishing, indeed, with what 
spirit they are supported, and how fresh and animated 
they are to the very last; — but still there is something 10 
too much of them — and they would be more waited for 
and welcomed, if they were not quite so lavish of their 
presence. — It was reserved for Shakespeare alone, to 
leave all his characters as new and unworn as he found 
them, — and to carry Falstaff through the business of 15 
three several plays, and leave us as greedy of his sayings 
as at the moment of his first introduction. It is no light 
praise to the author before us, that he has sometimes 
reminded us of this, as well as other inimitable excel- 
lences in that most gifted of all inventors. 20 

To complete this hasty and unpremeditated sketch of 
his general characteristics, we must add, that he is above 
all things national and Scottish, — and never seems to 
feel the powers of a Giant, except when he touches his 
native soil. His countrymen alone, therefore, can have 25 
a full sense of his merits, or a perfect relish of his 
excellences ; — and those only, indeed, of them, who 
have mingled, as he has done, pretty freely with the 
lower orders, and made themselves familiar not only 
with their language, but with the habits and traits of 30 
character, of which it then only becomes expressive. It 
is one thing to understand the meaning of words, as they 
are explained by other words in a glossary, and another 
to know their value, as expressive of certain feelings and 



I40 TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

huxxiciirs in the speakers to whom they are native, and as 
signs both of temper and condition among those who are 
famiUar with their import. 

We must content ourselves, we fear, with this hasty 
5 and superficial sketch of the general character of this 
author's performances, in the place of a more detailed 
examination of those which he has given to the public 
since we first announced him as the author of Waverley. 
The time for noticing his two intermediate works, has 

10 been permitted to go by so far, that it would probably be 
difficult to recall the public attention to them with any 
effect ; and, at all events, impossible to affect, by any 
observations of ours, the judgment which has been passed 
upon them, with very little assistance, we must say, from 

1 5 professed critics, by the mass of their intelligent readers, 
— by whom, ii^deed, we have no doubt that they are, by 
this time, as well known, and as correctly estimated, as 
if they had been indebted to us for their first impressions 
on the subject. For our own parts we must confess, that 

2o Waverley still has to us all the fascination of a first love ! 
and that we cannot help thinking, that the greatness of 
the public transactions in which that story was involved, 
as well as the wildness and picturesque graces of its 
Highland scehery and characters, have invested it with a 

25 charm, to which the more familiar attractions of the other 
pieces have not quite come up. In this, perhaps, our 
opinion differs from that of better judges; — but we 
cannot help suspecting, that the latter publications are 
most admired by many, at least in the southern part 

30 of the island, only because they are more easily and 
perfectly understood, in consequence of the training 
which had been gone through in the perusal of the 
former. But, however that be, we are far enough from 
denying that the two succeeding works are performances 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 141 

of extraordinary merit, — and are willing even to admit, 
that they show quite as much power and genius in the 
author — though, to our taste at least, the subjects are 
less happily selected. 



5 



The scene of the story thus strikingly introduced is 
laid — in Scotland of course — in those disastrous times 
which immediately preceded the Revolution of 1688 ; 
and exhibits a lively picture, both of the general state of 
manners at that period, and of the conduct and temper 10 
and principles of the two great parties in politics and 
religion that were then engaged in unequal and rancorous 
hostility. There are no times certainly, within the reach 
of authentic history, on which it is more painful to 
look back — which show a government more base and 15 
tyrannical, or a people more helpless and miserable : 
And though all pictures of the greater passions are full of 
interest, and a lively representation of strong and 
enthusiastic emotions never fails to be deeply attractive, 
the piece would have been too full of distress and 20 
humiliation, if it had been chiefly engaged with the 
course of public events, or the record of public feelings. 
So sad a subject would not have suited many readers — 
and the author, we suspect, less than any of them. 
Accordingly, in this, as in his other works, he has made 25 
use of the historical events which came in his way, 
rather to develope the characters, and bring out the 
peculiarities of the individuals whose adventures he 
relates, than for any purpose of political information ; 
and makes us present to the times in which he has placed 3° 
them, less by his direct notices of the great transactions 
by which they were distinguished, than by his casual 
intimations of their effects on private persons, and by the 
very contrast which their temper and occupations often 



142 • TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

appear to furnish to the colour of the national story. 
Nothing, indeed, in this respect is more delusive, or at 
least more woefully imperfect, than the suggestions of 
authentic history, as it is generally — or rather universally 
5 written — and nothing more exaggerated than the 
impressions it conveys of the actual state and condition 
of those who live in its most agitated periods. The great 
public events of which alone it takes cognizance, have 
but little direct influence upon the body of the people ; 

lo and do not, in general, form the principal business, or 
happiness or misery even of those who are in some 
measure concerned in them. Even in the worst and most 
disastrous times — in periods of civil war and revolution, 
and public discord and oppression, a great part of the 

15 time of a great part of the people is still spent in making 
love and money — in social amusement or professional 
industry — in schemes for worldly advancement or 
personal distinction, just as in periods of general peace 
and prosperity. Men court and marry very nearly as 

20 much in the one season as in the other ; and are as merry 
at weddings and christenings — as gallant at balls and 
races — as busy in their studies and counting houses — 
eat as heartily, in short, and sleep as sound — prattle 
with their children as pleasantly — and thin their 

25 plantations and scold their servants as zealously, as if 
their contemporaries were not furnishing materials thus 
abundantly for the Tragic muse of history. The quiet 
undercurrent of life, in short, keeps its deep and steady 
course in its eternal channels, unaffected, or but slightly 

30 disturbed, by the storms that agitate its surface ; and 
while long tracts of time, in the history of every country, 
seem, to the distant student of its annals, to be darkened 
over with one thick and oppressive cloud of unbroken 
misery, the greater part of those who have lived through 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. -143 

the whole acts of the tragedy will be found to have 
enjoyed a fair average share of felicity, and to have been 
much less impressed by the shocking events of their day 
than those who know nothing else of it than that such 
events took place in its course. Few men, in short, are 5 
historical characters — and scarcely any man is always, 
or most usually, performing a public part. The actual 
happiness of every life depends far more on things that 
regard it exclusively, than on those political occurrences 
which are the common concern of society ; and though 10 
nothing lends such an air, both of reality and importance, 
to a fictitious narrative, as to connect its persons with 
events in real history, still it is the imaginary individual 
himself that excites our chief interest throughout, and we 
care for the national affairs only in so far as they affect 15 
him. In one sense, indeed, this is the true end and 
the best use of history ; for as all public events are 
important only as they ultimately concern individuals, if 
the individual selected belong to a large and compre- 
hensive class, and the events, and their natural operation 20 
on him, be justly represented, we shall be enabled, in 
following out his adventures, to form no bad estimate of 
their true character and value for all the rest of the 
community. 

The author before us has done all this, we think ; and 25 
with admirable talent and effect : and if he has not been 
quite impartial in the management of his historical 
persons, has contrived, at any rate, to make them 
contribute largely to the interest of his acknowledged 
inventions. His view of the effects of great political 3° 
contentions on private happiness, is however, we have no 
doubt, substantially true ; and that chiefly because it is 
not exaggerated — because he does not confine himself 
to show how gentle natures may be roused into heroism, 



144 TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

or rougher tempers exasperated into rancour, by public 
oppression, — but turns still more willingly to show with 
what ludicrous absurdity genuine enthusiasm may be 
debased, how little the gaiety of the light-hearted and 
5 thoughtless may be impaired by the spectacle of public 
calamity, and how, in the midst of national distraction, 
selfishness will pursue its little game of quiet and cunning 
speculation — and gentler affections find time to multiply 
and to meet ! 

lo It is this, we think, that constitutes the great and 
peculiar merit of the work before us. It contains an 
admirable picture of manners and of characters ; and 
exhibits, we think, with great truth and discrimination, 
the extent and the variety of the shades which the 

15 stormy aspect of the political horizon would be likely to 
throw on such objects. And yet, though exhibiting 
beyond all doubt the greatest possible talent and 
originality, we cannot help fancying that we can trace the 
rudiments of almost all its characters in the very first 

20 of the author's publications. — Morton is but another 
edition of Waverley ; — taking a bloody part in political 
contention, without caring much about the cause, and 
interchanging high offices of generosity with his political 
opponents. — Claverhouse has many of the features of 

25 the gallant Fergus. — Cuddie Headrigg, of whose merits, 
by the way, we have given no fair specimen in our 
extracts, is a Dandie Dinmont of a considerably lower 
species ; — and even the Covenanters and their leaders 
were shadowed out, though afar off, in the gifted Gilfillan, 

30 and mine host of the Candlestick. It is in the picture 
of these hapless enthusiasts, undoubtedly, that the great 
merit and the great interest of the work consists. That 
interest, indeed, is so great, that we perceive it has even 
given rise to a sort of controversy among the admirers 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 145 

and contemners of those ancient worthies. It is a 
singular honour, no doubt, to a work of fiction and 
amusement, to be thus made the theme of serious attack 
and defence upon points of historical and theological 
discussion ; and to have grave dissertations written by c 
learned contemporaries upon the accuracy of its repre- 
sentations of public events and characters, or the moral 
effects of the style of ridicule in which it indulges. It 
is difficult for us, we confess, to view the matter in so 
serious a light ; nor do we feel much disposed, even if 10 
we had leisure for the task, to venture ourselves into the 
array of the disputants. One word or two, however, we 
shall say, before concluding, upon the two great points of 
difference, First, as to the author's profanity, in making 
scriptural expressions ridiculous by the misuse of them 15 
he has ascribed to the fanatics ; and, secondly, as to the 
fairness of his general representation of the conduct and 
character of the insurgent party and their opponents. 

As to the first, we do not know very well what to 
say. Undoubtedly, all light or jocular use of Scripture 20 
phraseology is in some measure indecent and profane : 
Yet we do not know in what other way those hypocritical 
pretences to extraordinary sanctity which generally 
disguise themselves in such a garb, can be so effectually 
exposed. And even where the ludicrous misapplication 25 
of holy writ arises from mere ignorance, or the foolish 
mimicry of more learned discoursers, as it is impossible 
to avoid smiling at the folly when it actually occurs, it is 
difficult for witty and humorous writers, in whose way it 
lies, to resist fabricating it for the purpose of exciting 30 
smiles. In so far as practice can afford any justification 
of such a proceeding, we conceive that its justification 
would be easy. In all our jest-books, and plays and 
works of humour for two centuries back, the characters 



146 TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

of Quakers and Puritans and Methodists, have been 
constantly introduced as fit objects of ridicule, on this 
very account. The Reverend Jonathan Swift is full of 
jokes of this description ; and the pious and correct 
5 Addison himself is not a little fond of a sly and witty 
application of a text from the sacred writings. When an 
author, therefore, whose aim was amusement, had to do 
with a set of people, all of whom dealt in familiar 
applications of Bible phrases and Old Testament adven- 

10 tures, and who, undoubtedly, very often made absurd and 
ridiculous applications of them, it would be rather hard, 
we think, to interdict him entirely from the representation 
of these absurdities ; or to put in force, for him alone, 
those statutes against profaneness which so many other 

15 people have been allowed to transgress, in their hours of 
gaiety, without censure or punishment. 

On the other point, also, we rather lean to the side of 
the author. He is a Tory, we think, pretty plainly in 
principle, and scarcely disguises his preference for a 

20 Cavalier over a Puritan : But, with these propensitie3, we 
think he has dealt pretty fairly with both sides — es- 
pecially when it is considered that, though he lays his 
scene in a known crisis of his national history, his work 
is professedly a work of fiction, and cannot well be 

25 accused of misleading any one as to matters of fact. He 
might have made Claverhouse victorious at Drumclog, if 
he had thought fit — and nobody could have found fault 
with him. The insurgent Presbyterians of 1666 and the 
subsequent years, were, beyond all question, a pious, 

30 brave, and conscientious race of men — to whom, and to 
whose efforts and sufferings, their descendants are deeply 
indebted for the liberty both civil and religious which 
they still enjoy, as well as for the spirit of resistance to 
tyranny, which, we trust, they have inherited along with 



TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 147 

it. Considered generally as a party, it is impossible that 
they should ever be remembered, at least in Scotland, 
but with gratitude and veneration — that their sufferings 
should ever be mentioned but with deep resentment and 
horror — or their heroism, both active and passive, but 5 
with pride and exultation. At the same time, it is impos- 
sible to deny, that there were among them many absurd 
and ridiculous persons — and some of a savage and 
ferocious character — old women, in short, like Mause 
Headrigg — preachers like Kettledrummle — or despera- 10 
does like Balfour of Burley. That a Tory novelist 
should bring such characters prominently forward, in a 
tale of the times, appears to us not only to be quite 
natural, but really to be less blamable than almost any 
other way in which party feelings could be shown. But, 15 
even he, has not represented the bulk of the party as 
falling under this description, or as fairly represented by 
such personages. He has made his hero — who, of 
course, possesses all possible virtues — of that per- 
suasion ; and has allowed them, in general, the courage 20 
of martyrs, the self-denial of hermits, and the zeal and 
sincerity of apostles. His representation is almost 
avowedly that of one who is not of their communion ; 
and yet we think it impossible to peruse it, without feel- 
ing the greatest respect and pity for those to whom it is 25 
applied. A zealous Presbyterian might, no doubt, have 
said more in their favour, without violating, or even con- 
cealing the truth ; but, while zealous Presbyterians will 
not write entertaining novels themselves, they cannot 
expect to be treated in them with exactly the same favour 30 
as if that had been the character of their authors. 

With regard to the author's picture of their opponents, 
we must say that, with the exception of Claverhouse him- 
self, whom he has invested gratuitously with many graces 



148 TALES OF MY LANDLORD. 

and liberalities to which we are persuaded he has no 
title, and for whom, indeed, he has a foolish fondness, 
with which it would be absurd to deal seriously — he has 
shown no signs of a partiality that can be blamed, nor 
5 exhibited many traits in them with which their enemies 
have reason to quarrel. If any person can read his 
strong and lively pictures of military insolence and 
oppression, without feeling his blood boil within him, we 
must conclude the fault to be in his own apathy, and not 

10 in any softenings of the partial author: — nor do we 
know any Whig writer who has exhibited the baseness 
and cruelty of that wretched government, in more naked 
and revolting deformity, than in his scene of the torture 
at the Privy Council. The military executions of Claver- 

15 house himself are admitted without palliation : and the 
bloodthirstiness of Dalzell, and the brutality of Lauder- 
dale, are represented in their true colours. In short, if 
this author has beeti somewhat severe upon the Cove- 
nanters, neither has he spared their oppressors ; and the 

20 truth probably is, that never dreaming of being made 
responsible for historical accuracy or fairness in a com- 
position of this description, he has exaggerated a little on 
both sides, for the sake of effect — and been carried, by 
the bent of his humour, most frequently to exaggerate on 

25 that which afforded the greatest scope for ridicule. 



ESSAYS ON THE NATURE AND PRINCIPLES 
OF TASTE. 



By Archibald Alison^ LL.B., F.R.S., Prebendary of Sariun, etc. 
2 vols. 8vo. 



# * * # * 

It is unnecessary, however, to pursue these criticisms, 
or, indeed, this hasty review of the speculation of other 
writers, any farther. The few observations we have 
already made, will enable the intelligent reader, both to 
understand in a general way what has been already done 5 
on the subject, and in some degree prepare him to 
appreciate the merits of that theory, substantially the 
same with Mr. Alison's, which we shall now proceed to 
illustrate somewhat more in detail. 

The basis of it is, that the beauty which we impute to 10 
outward objects, is nothing more than the reflection of 
our own inward emotions, and is made up entirely of 
certain little portions of love, pity, or other affections, 
which have been connected with these objects, and 
still adhere as it were to them, and move us anew 15 
whenever they are presented to our observation. Before 
proceeding to bring any proof of the truth of this 
proposition, there are two things that it may be proper to 
explain a little more distinctly. First, What are the 
primary affections, by the suggestion of which we think 20 
the sense of beauty is produced ? And, secondly. What 
is the nature of the connection by which we suppose that 
the objects we call beautiful are enabled to suggest these 
affections ? 



150 NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 

With regard to the first of these points, it fortunately 
is not necessary either to enter into any tedious details, 
or to have recourse to any nice distinctions. All 
sensations that are not absolutely indifferent, and are, at 
5 the same time, either agreeable, when experienced by 
ourselves, or attractive when contemplated in others, may 
form the foundation of the emotions of sublimity or 
beauty. The love of sensation seems to be the ruling 
appetite of human nature ; and many sensations, in which 

10 the painful may be thought to predominate, are conse- 
quently sought for with avidity, and recollected with 
interest, even in our own persons. In the persons of 
others, emotions still more painful are contemplated with 
eagerness and delight : and therefore we must not be 

15 surprised to find, that many of the pleasing sensations of 
beauty or sublimity resolve themselves ultimately into 
recollections of feelings that may appear to have a very 
opposite character. The sum of the whole is, that every 
feeling which it is agreeable to experience, to recal, or to 

20 witness, may become the source of beauty in external 
objects, when it is so connected with them as that their 
appearance reminds us of that feeling. Now, in real 
life, and from daily experience and observation, we know 
that it is agreeable, in the first place, to recollect our own 

25 pleasurable sensations, or to be enabled to form a lively 
conception of the pleasures of other men, or even of 
sentient beings of any description. We know likewise, 
from the same sure authority, that there is a certain 
delight in the remembrance of our past, or the conception 

30 of our future emotions, even though attended with great 
pairv provided the pain be not forced too rudely on the 
mind, and be softened by the accompaniment of any 
milder feeling. And finally, we know, in the same 
manner, that the spectacle or conception of the emotions 



I 



NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 15 1 

of Others, even when in a high degree painful, is 
extremely interesting and attractive, and draws us away, 
not only from the consideration of indifferent objects, 
but even from the pursuit of light or frivolous enjoyments. 
All these are plain and familiar facts ; of the existence 5 
of which, however they may be explained, no one can 
entertain the slightest doubt — and into which, therefore, 
we shall have made no inconsiderable progress, if we 
can resolve the more mysterious fact, of the emotions 
we receive from the contemplation of sublimity or 10 
beauty. 

Our proposition then is, that these emotions are not 
original emotions, nor produced directly by any material 
qualities in the objects which excite them ; but are 
reflections, or images, of the more radical and familiar 15 
emotions to which we have already alluded ; and are occa- 
sioned, not by any inherent virtue in the objects before 
us, but by the accidents, if we may so express ourselves, 
by which these may have been enabled to suggest or 
recal to us our past sensations or sympathies. We might 20 
almost venture, indeed, to lay it down as an axiom, that, 
except in the plain and palpable case of bodily pain or 
pleasure, we can never be i7iterested in any thing but the 
fortunes of sentient beings ; — and that every thing 
partaking of the nature of mental emotion, must have 25 
for its object the feelings^ past, present, or possible, of 
something capable of sensation. Independent, therefore, 
of all evidence, and without the help of any explanation, 
we should have been apt to conclude, that the emotions 
of beauty and sublimity must have for their objects the 30 
sufferings or enjoyments of sentient beings ; — and to 
reject, as intrinsically absurd and incredible, the suppo- 
sition that material objects, which obviously do neither 
hurt nor delight the body, should yet excite, by their 



152 NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 

mere physical qualities, the very powerful emotions which 
are sometimes excited by the spectacle of beauty. 

Of the feelings, by their connection with which external 
objects become beautiful, we do not think it necessary to 
5 speak more minutely ; — and, therefore, it only remains, 
under this preliminary view of the subject, to explain the 
nature of that connection by which we conceive this 
effect to be produced. Here, also, there is but little 
need for minuteness, or fulness of enumeration. Almost 

10 every tie, by which two objects can be bound together 
in the imagination, in such a manner as that the 
presentment of the one shall recal the memory of the 
other ; — or, in other words, almost every possible relation 
which can subsist between such objects, may serve to 

15 connect the things we call sublime and beautiful, with 

feelings that are interesting or delightful. It may be 

useful, however, to class these bonds of association 

between mind and matter in a rude and general way. 

It appears to us, then, that objects are sublime or 

20 beautiful, first., when they are the natural signs, and 
perpetual concomitants of pleasurable sensations, or, at 
any rate, of some lively feeling of emotion in ourselves 
or in some other sentient beings ; or, seco?tdly, when they 
are the arbitrary or accidental concomitants of such 

25 feelings ; or, thirdly, when they bear some analogy or 
fanciful resemblance to things with which these emotions 
are necessarily connected. In endeavouring to illustrate 
the nature of these several relations, we shall be led to 
lay before our readers some proofs that appear to us 

30 satisfactory of the truth of the general theory. 

The most obvious, and the strongest association that 
can be established between inward feelings and external 
objects is, where the object is necessarily and universally 
connected with the feeling by the law of nature, so that 



NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 153 

it is always presented to the senses when the feeling is 
impressed upon the mind — as the sight or the sound of 
laughter, with the feeling of gaiety — of weeping, with 
distress — of the sound of thunder, with ideas of danger 
and power. Let us dwell for a moment on the last 5 
instance. — Nothing, perhaps, in the whole range of 
nature, is more strikingly and universally sublime than 
the sound we have just mentioned ; yet it seems obvious, 
that the sense of sublimity is produced, not by any 
quality that is perceived by the ear, but altogether by the 10 
impression of power and of danger that is necessarily 
made upon the mind, whenever that sound is heard. 
That it is not produced by any peculiarity in the sound 
itself, is certain, from the mistakes that are frequently 
made with regard to it. The noise of a cart rattling over 15 
the stones, is often mistaken for thunder ; and as long 
as the mistake lasts, this very vulgar and insignificant 
noise is actually felt to be prodigiously sublime. It is so 
felt, however, it is perfectly plain, merely because it is 
then associated with ideas of prodigious power and 20 
undefined danger ; — and the sublimity is accordingly 
destroyed, the moment the association is dissolved, though 
the sound itself and its effect on the organ', continue 
exactly the same. This, therefore, is an instance in 
which sublimity is distinctly proved to consist, not in any 25 
physical quality of the object to which it is ascribed, but 
in its necessary connection with that vast and uncontrolled 
Power which is the natural object of awe and veneration. 



The only other advantage which we shall specify as 
likely to result from the general adoption of the theory 30 
we have been endeavouring to illustrate is, that it seems 



154 NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 

calculated to put an end to all these perplexing and 
vexatious questions about the standard of taste, which 
have given occasion to so much impertinent and so 
much elaborate discussion. If things are not beautiful 

5 in themselves, but only as they serve to suggest inter- 
esting conceptions to the mind, then every thing which 
does in point of fact suggest such a conception to any 
individual, is beautiful to that individual ; and it is not 
only quite true that there is no room for disputing about 

10 tastes, but that all tastes are equally just and correct, 
in so far as each individual speaks only of his own 
emotions. When a man calls a thing beautiful, how- 
ever, he may indeed, mean to make two very different 
assertions ; — he may mean that it gives him pleasure by 

15 suggesting to him some interesting emotion ; and, in this 
sense, there can be no doubt that, if he merely speak 
truth, the thing is beautiful ; and that it pleases him 
precisely in the same way that all other things please 
those to whom they appear beautiful. But if he mean 

20 farther to say that the thing possesses some quality 
which should make it appear beautiful to every other 
person, and that it is owing to some prejudice or defect 
in them if it appear otherwise, then he is as unreasonable 
and absurd as he would think those who should attempt 

25 to convince him that he felt no emotion of beauty. 

All tastes, then, are equally just and true, in so far as 
concerns the individual whose taste is in question ; and 
what a man feels distinctly to be beautiful, is beautiful to 
him, whatever other people may think of it. All this 

30 follows clearly from the theory now in question : but it 
does not follow, from it, that all tastes are equally good 
or desirable, or that there is any difficulty in describing 
that which is really the best, and the most to be envied. 
The only use of the faculty of taste is to afford an 



NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 155 

innocent delight, and to assist in the cultivation of a 
finer morality ; and that man certainly will have the most 
delight from this faculty, who has the most numerous and 
the most powerful perceptions of beauty. But, if beauty 
consist in the reflection of our affections and sympathies, 5 
it is plain that he will always see the most beauty whose 
affections are the warmest and most exercised — whose 
imagination is the most powerful, and who has most 
accustomed himself to attend to the objects by which he 
is surrounded. In so far as mere feeling and enjoyment 10 
are concerned, therefore, it seems evident, that the best 
taste must be that which belongs to the best affections, 
the most active fancy, and the most attentive habits of 
observation. It will follow pretty exactly too, that all 
men's perceptions of beauty will be nearly in proportion 15 
to the degree of their sensibility and social sympathies ; 
and that those who have no affections towards sentient 
beings, will be as certainly insensible to beauty in external 
objects, as he, who cannot hear the sound of his friend's 
voice, must be deaf to its echo. 20 

In so far as the sense of beauty is regarded as a mere 
source of enjoyment, this seems to be the only distinction 
that deserves to be attended to ; and the only cultivation 
that taste should ever receive, with a view to the gratifi- 
cation of the individual, should be through the indirect 25 
channel of cultivating the affections and powers of obser- 
vation. If we aspire, however, to be creators^ as well as 
observers of beauty, and place any part of our happiness 
in ministering to the gratification of others — as artists, 
or poets, or authors of any sort — then, indeed, a new 30 
distinction of tastes, and a far more laborious system of 
cultivation, will be necessary. A man who pursues only 
his own delight, will be as much charmed with objects 
that suggest powerful emotions in consequence of per- 



156 NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 

sonal and accidental associations, as with those that 
introduce similar emotions by means of associations that 
are universal and indestructible. To him, all objects of 
the former class are really as beautiful as those of the 

5 latter — and for his own gratification, the creation of 
that sort of beauty is just as important an occupation : 
but if he conceive the ambition of creating beauties for 
the admiration of others, he must be cautious to employ 
only such objects as are the natural signs, or the insepara- 

10 ble concomitants of emotions, of which the greater part 
of mankind are susceptible ; and his taste will then deserve 
to be called bad and false, if he obtrude upon the public, 
as beautiful, objects that are not likely to be associated 
in common minds with any interesting impressions. 

15 For a man himself, then, there is no taste that is either 
bad or false ; and the only difference worthy of being 
attended to, is that between a great deal and a very 
little. Some who have cold affections, sluggish imagina- 
tions, and no habits of observation, can with difficulty 

20 discern beauty in any thing ; while others, who are 
full of kindness and sensibility, and who have been 
accustomed to attend to all the objects around them, 
feel it almost in every thing. It is no matter what other 
people may think of the objects of their admiration ; nor 

25 ought it to be any concern of theirs that the public would 
be astonished or offended, if they were called upon to 
join in that admiration. So long as no such call is 
made, this anticipated discrepancy of feeling need give 
them no uneasiness ; and the suspicion of it should pro- 

30 duce no contempt in any other persons. It is a strange 
aberration indeed of vanity that makes us despise persons 
for being happy — for having sources of enjoyment in 
which we cannot share : — and yet this is the true source 
of the ridicule, which is so generally poured upon indi- 



NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 157 

viduals who seek only to enjoy their peculiar tastes 
unmolested : — for, if there be any truth in the theory 
we have been expounding, no taste is bad for any other 
reason than because it is peculiar — as the objects in 
which it delights must actually serve to suggest to the 5 
individual those common emotions and universal affec- 
tions upon which the sense of beauty is every where 
founded. The misfortune is, however, that we are apt 
to consider all persons who make known their peculiar 
relishes, and especially all who create any objects for 10 
their gratification, as in some measure dictating to the 
public, and setting up an idol for general adoration ; and 
hence this intolerant interference with almost all peculiar 
perceptions of beauty, and the unsparing derision that 
pursues all deviations from acknowledged standards. 15 
This intolerance, we admit, is often provoked by some- 
thing of a spirit of proselytis7n and arrogance, in those 
who mistake their own casual associations for natural 
or universal relations ; and the consequence is, that 
mortified vanity ultimately dries up, even for them, the 20 
fountain of their peculiar enjoyment ; and disenchants, 
by a new association of general contempt or ridicule, the 
scenes that had been consecrated by some innocent but 
accidental emotion. 

As all men must have some peculiar associations, all 25 
men must have some peculiar notions of beauty, and, of 
course, to a certain extent, a taste that the public would 
be entitled to consider as false or vitiated. For those 
who make no demands on public admiration, however, it 
is hard to be obliged to sacrifice this source of enjoy- 30 
ment ; and, even for those who labour for applause, the 
wisest course, perhaps, if it were only practicable, would 
be, to have two tastes — one to enjoy, and one to work 
by — one founded upon universal associations, according 



158 NATURE AND PRINCIPLES OF TASTE. 

to which they finished those performances for which they 
challenged univeral praise — and another guided by all 
casual and individual associations, through which they 
might still look fondly upon nature, and upon the objects 
S of their secret admiration. 



WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 



A Novel. From the German of Goethe, j vols. i2mo, pp. lojo. 
Edinburgh, 1824. 



There are few things that at first sight appear more 
capricious and unaccountable, than the diversities of 
national taste ; and yet there are not many, that, to a 
certain extent at least, admit of a clearer explanation. 
They form evidently a section in the great chapter of 5 
National Character ; and, proceeding on the assumption, 
that human nature is everywhere fundamentally the same, 
it is not perhaps very difficult to indicate, in a general 
way, the circumstances which have distmguished it into 
so many local varieties. 10 

These may be divided into two great classes, — the 
one embracing all that relates to the newness or antiquity 
of the society to which they belong, or, in other words, to 
the stage which any particular nation has attained in that 
great progress from rudeness to refinement, in which all 15 
are engaged ; — the other comprehending what may be 
termed the accidental causes by which the character and 
condition of communities may be affected ; such as their 
government, their relative position as to power and 
civilization to neighbouring countries, their prevailing 20 
occupations, determined in some degree by the capabili- 
ties of their soil and climate, and more than all perhaps, 
as to the question of taste, the still more accidental 
circumstance of the character of their first models of 



i6o WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 

excellence, or the kind of merit by which their admiration 
and national vanity had first been excited. 

It is needless to illustrate these obvious sources of 
peculiarity at any considerable length. It is not more 
5 certain, that all primitive communities proceed to civiliza- 
tion by nearly the same stages, than that the progress of 
taste is marked by corresponding gradations, and may, in 
most cases, be distinguished into periods, the order and 
succession of which is nearly as uniform and determined. 

lo If tribes of savage men always proceed, under ordinary 
circumstances, from the occupation of hunting to that of 
pasturage, from that to agriculture, and from that to 
commerce and manufactures, the sequence is scarcely 
less invariable in the history of letters and art. In 

15 the former, verse is uniformly antecedent to prose — 
marvellous legends to correct history — exaggerated sen- 
timents to just representations of nature. Invention, in 
short, regularly comes before judgment, warmth of feeling 
before correct reasoning — and splendid declamation and 

20 broad humour before delicate simplicity or refined wit. In 
the arts again, the progress is strictly analogous — from 
mere monstrosity to ostentatious displays of labour and 
design, first in massive formality, and next in fantastical 
minuteness, variety, and flutter of parts ; — and then, 

25 through the gradations of startling contrasts and over- 
wrought expression, to the repose and simplicity of 
graceful nature. 

These considerations alone explain much of that 
contrariety of taste by which different nations are dis- 

30 tinguished. They not only start in the great career of 
improvement at different times, but they advance in it 
with different velocities — some lingering longer in one 
stage than another — some obstructed and some helped 
forward, by circumstances operating on them from within 



WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. i6i 

or from without. It is the unavoidable consequence, 
however, of their being in any one particular position, 
that they will judge of their own productions and those 
of their neighbours, according to that standard of taste 
which belongs to the place they then hold in this great 5 
circle ; — and that a whole people will look on their 
neighbours with wonder and scorn, for admiring what 
their own grandfathers looked on with equal admiration, 
— while they themselves are scorned and vilified in 
return, for tastes which will infallibly be adopted by the 10 
grandchildren of those who despise them. 

What we have termed the accidental causes of great 
differences in beings of the same nature, do not of course 
admit of quite so simple an exposition. But it is not in 
reality more difficult to prove their existence and explain 15 
their operationo Where great and degrading despotisms 
have been early established, either by the aid of super- 
stition or of mere force, as in most of the states in Asia, 
or where small tribes of mixed descent have been engaged 
in perpetual contention for freedom and superiority, as in 20 
ancient Greece — where the ambition and faculties of 
individuals have been chained up by the institution of 
castes and indelible separations, as in India and Egypt, 
or where all men practise all occupations and aspire to 
all honours, as in Germany or Britain — where the sole 25 
occupation of the people has been war, as in infant 
Rome, or where a vast pacific population has been for 
ages inured to mechanical drudgery, as in China — it 
is needless to say, that very opposite notions of what 
conduces to delight and amusement must necessarily 30 
prevail ; and that the Taste of the nation must be 
affected both by the sentiments which it has been 
taught to cultivate, and the capacities it has been led 
to unfold. 



1 62 WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 

The influence of early models, however, is perhaps 
the most considerable of any ; and may be easily enough 
understood. When men have been accustomed to any 
particular kind of excellence, they naturally become good 
5 judges of it, and account certain considerable degrees of 
it indispensable, — while they are comparatively blind to 
the merit of other good qualities to which they had been 
less habituated, and are neither offended by their absence, 
nor at all skilful in their estimation. Thus those nations 

lo who, like the English and the Dutch, have been long 
accustomed to great cleanliness and order in their persons 
and dwellings, naturally look with admiration on the 
higher displays of those qualities, and are proportionately 
disgusted by their neglect ; while they are apt to under- 

15 value mere pomp and stateliness, when destitute of these 
recommendations : and thus also the Italians and 
Sicilians, bred in the midst of dirt and magnificence, 
are curiously alive to the beauties of architecture and 
sculpture, and make but little account of the more homely 

20 comforts which are so highly prized by the others. In 
the same way, if a few of the first successful adventurers 
in art should have excelled in any particular qualities, the 
taste of their nation will naturally be moulded on that 
standard — will regard those qualities almost exclusively 

25 as entitled to admiration, and will not only consider the 
want of them as fatal to all pretentions to excellence, but 
will unduly despise and undervalue other qualities, in 
themselves not less valuable, but with which their national 
models had not happened to make them timeously 

30 familiar. If, for example, the first great writers in any 
country should have distinguished themselves by a 
pompous and severe regularity, and a certain elaborate 
simplicity of design and execution, it will naturally follow, 
that the national taste will not only become critical and 



WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 163 

rigorous as to those particulars, but will be proportionally 
deadened to the merit of vivacity, nature, and invention, 
when combined with irregularity, homeliness, or confusion. 
While, if the great patriarchs of letters had excelled in 
variety and rapidity of invention, and boldness and truth 5 
of sentiment, though poured out with considerable 
disorder and incongruity of manner, those qualities would 
come to be the national criterion of merit, and the 
correctness and decorum of the other school be despised, 
as mere recipes for monotony and tameness. 10 

These, we think, are the plain and certain effects of 
the peculiar character of the first great popular writers of 
all countries. But still we do not conceive that they 
depend altogether on any thing so purely accidental as 
the temperament or early history of a few individuals. 15 
No doubt the national taste of France and of England 
would at this moment have been different, had Shakespeare 
been a Frenchman, and Boileau and Racine written in 
English. But then, we do not think that Shakespeare 
could have been a Frenchman ; and we conceive that his 20 
character, and that of other original writers, though no 
doubt to be considered on the whole as casual, must yet 
have been modified to a great extent by the circumstances 
of the countries in which they were bred. It is plain 
that no original force of genius could have enabled 25 
Shakespeare to write as he had done, if he had been 
born and bred among the Chinese or the Peruvians. 
Neither do we think that he could have done so, in any 
other country but England — free, sociable, discursive, 
reformed, familiar England — whose motley and mingling 30 
population not only presented "every change of many- 
coloured life " to his eye, but taught and permitted every 
class, from the highest to the lowest, to know and to 
estimate the feelings and the habits of all the others — and 



164 WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 

thus enabled the gifted observer not only to deduce the 
true character of human nature from this infinite variety 
of experiments and examples, but to speak to the sense 
and the hearts of each, with that truly universal tongue, 
5 which every one feels to be peculiar, and all enjoy as 
common. 

We have said enough, however, or rather too much, on 
these general views of the subject — which in truth is 
sufficiently clear in those extreme cases, where the 

10 contrariety is great and universal, and is only perplexing 
when there is a pretty general conformity both in the 
causes which influence taste and in the results. Thus, 
we are not at all surprised to find the taste of the 
Japanese or the Iroquois very different from our own — 

15 and have no difficulty in both admitting that our human 
nature and human capacities are substantially the same, 
and in referring this discrepancy to the contrast that 
exists in the whole state of society, and the knowledge, 
and the opposite qualities of the objects to which we 

20 have been respectively accustomed to give our admiration. 
That nations living in times or places altogether remote, 
should disagree in taste, as in every thing else, seems to 
us quite natural. They are only the nearer cases that 
puzzle. And, that great European countries, peopled by 

25 the same mixed races, educated in the admiration of the 
same classical models — venerating the same remains of 
antiquity — engaged substantially in the same occupations 
— communicating every day, on business, letters, and 
society — bound up in short in one great commonwealth, 

30 as against the inferior and barbarous parts of the 
world, should yet differ so widely — not only as to the 
comparative excellence of their respective productions, 
but as to the constituents of excellence in all works of 
genius or skill, does indeed sound like a paradox, the 



WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 165 

solution of which every one may not be able to deduce 
from the preceding observations. 

The great practical equation on which we in this 
country have been hitherto most frequently employed, 
has been between our own standard of taste and that 5 
which is recognized among our neighbours of France : — 
And certainly, though feelings of rivalry have somewhat 
aggravated its apparent, beyond its real amount, there is 
a great and substantial difference to be accounted for, — 
in the way we have suggested — or in some other way. 10 
Stating that difference as generally as possible, we would 
say, that the French, compared with ourselves, are more 
sensitive to faults, and less transported with beauties — 
more enamoured of art, and less indulgent to nature — 
more charmed with overcoming difficulties, than with that 15 
power which makes us unconscious of their existence — 
more averse to strong emotions, or at least less covetous 
of them in their intensity — more students of taste, in 
short, than adorers of genius — and far more disposed 
than any other people, except perhaps the Chinese, to 20 
circumscribe the rules of taste to such as they themselves 
have been able to practise, and to limit the legitimate 
empire of genius to the provinces they have explored. 
There has been a good deal of discussion of late 
years, in the face of literary Europe, on these debatable 25 
grounds ; and we cannot but think that the result has 
been favourable, on the whole, to the English, and that 
the French have been compelled to recede considerably 
from many of their exclusive pretensions — a result which 
we are inclined to ascribe, less to the arguments of our 30 
native champions, than to those circumstances in the 
recent history of Europe, which have compelled our 
ingenious neighbours to mingle more than they had ever 
done before with the surrounding nations — and thus to 



1 66 WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 

become better acquainted with the diversified forms which 
genius and talent may assume. 

But while we are thus fairly in the way of settling our 
differences with France, we are little more than beginning 
5 them, we fear, with Germany ; and the perusal of the 
extraordinary volumes before us, which has suggested all 
the preceding reflections, has given us, at the same time, 
an impression of such radical, and apparently irrecon- 
cilable disagreement as to principles, as we can scarcely 

10 hope either to remove by our reasonings, or even very 
satisfactorily to account for by our suggestions. 

This is allowed, by the general consent of all 
Germany, to be the very greatest work of their very 
greatest writer. The most original, the most varied and 

15 inventive, — the most characteristic, in short, of the 
author, and of his country. We receive it as such 
accordingly, with implicit faith and suitable respect ; and 
have perused it in consequence with very great attention 
and no common curiosity. We have perused it, indeed, 

20 only in the translation of which we have prefixed the 
title : But it is a translation by a professed admirer ; 
and by one who is proved by his Preface to be a person 
of talents, and by every part of the work to be no 
ordinary master, at least of one of the languages with 

25 which he has to deal. We need scarcely say, that we 
profess to judge of the work only according to our own 
principles of judgment and habits of feeling ; and, 
meaning nothing less than to dictate to the readers or 
the critics of Germany what they should think of their 

30 favourite authors, propose only to let them know, in 
all plainness and modesty, what we, and we really believe 
most of our countrymen, actually think of this chef-d^ ceuvre 
of Teutonic genius. 

We must say, then, at once, that we cannot enter into 



WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 167 

the spirit of this German idolatry ; nor at all comprehend 
upon what grounds the work before us could ever be 
considered as an admirable, or even a commendable 
performance. To us it certainly appears, after the 
most deliberate consideration, to be eminently absurd, 5 
puerile, incongruous, vulgar, and affected ; — and, though 
redeemed by considerable powers of invention, and some 
traits of vivacity, to be so far from perfection, as to be, 
almost from beginning to end, one flagrant offence 
against every principle of taste, and every just rule of 10 
composition. Though indicating, in many places, a mind 
capable both of acute and profound reflection, it is full 
of mere silliness and childish affectation ; — and though 
evidently the work of one who had seen and observed 
much, it is throughout altogether unnatural, and not so 15 
properly improbable, as affectedly fantastic and absurd — 
kept, as it were, studiously aloof from general or ordinary 
nature — never once bringing us into contact with real 
life or genuine character — and, where not occupied with 
the professional squabbles, paltry jargon, and scenical 20 
profligacy of strolling players, tumblers, and mummers 
(which may be said to form its staple), is conversant only 
with incomprehensible mystics and vulgar men of whim, 
with whom, if it were at all possible to understand them, 
it would be a baseness to be acquainted. Every thing, 25 
and every body we meet with, is a riddle and an oddity ; 
and though the tissue of the story is sufficiently coarse, 
and the manners and sentiments infected with a strong 
tinge of vulgarity, it is all kept in the air, like a piece of 
machinery at the minor theatres, and never allowed to 30 
touch the solid ground, or to give an impression of 
reality, by the disclosure of known or living features. In 
the midst of all this, however, there are, every now and 
then, outbreakings of a fine speculation, and gleams of a 



1 68 WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 

warm and sprightly imagination — an occasional wild and 
exotic glow of fancy and poetry — a vigorous heaping 
up of incidents, and touches of bright and powerful 
description. 
5 It is not very easy certainly to account for these 
incongruities, or to suggest an intelligible theory for so 
strange a practice. But in so far as we can guess, these 
peculiarities of German taste are to be referred, in part, 
to the comparative newness of original composition 

lo among that ingenious people, and to the state of European 
literature when they first ventured on the experiment — 
and in part to the state of society in, that great country 
itself, and the comparatively humble condition of the 
greater part of those who write, or to whom writing is 

15 there addressed. 

The Germans, though undoubtedly an imaginative 
and even enthusiastic race, had neglected their native 
literature for two hundred years — and were chiefly 
known for their learning and industry. They wrote huge 

20 Latin treatises on Law and Theology — and put forth 
bulky editions and great tomes of annotations on the 
classics. At last, however, they grew tired of being 
respected as the learned drudges of Europe, and 
reproached with their consonants and commentators ; and 

25 determined, about fifty years ago, to show what metal 
they were made of, and to give the world a taste of their 
quality, as men of genius and invention. In this attempt 
the first thing to be effected was at all events to avoid the 
imputation of being scholastic imitators of the classics. 

30 That would have smelt too much, they thought, of the 
old shop ; and in order to prove their claims to originality, 
it was necessary to go a little into the opposite extreme, — 
to venture on something decidedly modern, and to show 
at once their independence on their old masters, and 



WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 169 

their superiority to the pedantic rules of antiquity. With 
this view some of them betook themselves to the French 
models — set seriously to study how to be gay — apprendre 
a etre vif — and composed a variety of petites pieces and 
novels of polite gallantry, in a style — of which we shall 5 
at present say nothing. This manner, however, ran too 
much counter to the general character of the nation to 
be very much followed — and undoubtedly the greater 
and better part of their writers turned rather to us, for 
hints and lessons to guide them in their ambitious career. 10 
There was a greater original affinity in the temper and 
genius of the two nations — and, in addition to that 
consideration, our great authors were indisputably at once 
more original and less classical than those of France. 
England, however, we are sorry to say, could furnish 15 
abundance of bad as well as of good models — and even 
the best were perilous enough for rash imitators. As 
it happened, however, the worst were most generally 
selected — and the worst parts of the good. Shakespeare 
was admired — but more for his flights of fancy, his daring 20 
improprieties, his trespasses on the borders of absurdity, 
than for the infinite sagacity and rectifying good sense 
by which he redeemed those extravagancies, or even the 
profound tenderness and simple pathos which alternated 
with the lofty soaring or dazzling imagery of his style. 25 
Altogether, however, Shakespeare was beyond their 
rivalry ; and although Schiller has dared, and not inglori- 
ously, to emulate his miracles, it was plainly to other 
merits and other rivalries that the body of his ingenious 
countrymen aspired. The ostentatious absurdity — the 30 
affected oddity — the pert familiarity — the broken style, 
and exaggerated sentiment of Tristram Shandy — the 
mawkish morality, dawdling details, and interminable 
agonies of Richardson — the vulgar adventures, and 



170 WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 

homely, though, at the same time, fantastical speculations 
of John Buncle and others of his forgotten class, found 
far more favour in their eyes. They were original, 
startling, unclassical, and puzzling. They excited curiosity 
5 by not being altogether intelligible — effectually excluded 
monotony by the rapidity and violence of their transitions, 
and promised to rouse the most torpid sensibility, by the 
violence and perseverance with which they thundered at 
the heart. They were the very things, in short, which 

10 the German originals were in search of ; — and they were 
not slow, therefore, in adopting and improving on them. 
In order to make them thoroughly their own, they had 
only to exaggerate their peculiarities — to mix up with 
them a certain allowance of their old visionary philosophy, 

15 misty metaphysics, and superstitious visions — and to 
introduce a few crazy sententious theorists, to sprinkle 
over the whole a seasoning of rash speculation on morality 
and the fine arts. 

The style was also to be relieved by a variety of odd 

20 comparisons and unaccountable similes — borrowed, for 
the most part, from low and revolting objects, and all the 
better if they did not exactly fit the subject, or even 
introduced new perplexity into that which they professed 
to illustrate. 

25 This goes far, we think, to explain the absurdity, 
incongruity, and affectation of the works of which we are 
speaking. But there is yet another distinguishing quality 
for which we have not accounted — and that is a peculiar 
kind of vulgarity which pervades all their varieties, and 

30 constitutes, perhaps, their most repulsive characteristic. 
We do not know very well how to describe this unfortu- 
nate peculiarity, except by saying that it is the vulgarity 
of pacific, comfortable burghers, occupied with stuffing, 
cooking, and providing for their coarse personal accommo- 



WJLHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 17 1 

dations. There certainly never were any men of genius 
who condescended to attend so minutely to the non- 
naturals of their heroes and heroines as the novelists of 
modern Germany. Their works smell, as it were, of 
groceries — of brown papers filled with greasy cakes and 5 
slices of bacon, — and fryings in frowsy back parlours. 
All the interesting recollections of childhood turn on 
remembered tidbits and plunderings of savoury store- 
rooms. In the midst of their most passionate scenes 
there is always a serious and affectionate notice of 10 
the substantial pleasures of eating and drinking. The 
raptures of a tete-a-tete are not complete without a bottle 
of nice wine and a "trim collation." Their very sages 
deliver their oracles over a glass of punch ; and the 
enchanted lover finds new apologies for his idolatry in 15 
taking a survey of his mistress's "combs, soap, and 
towels, with the traces of their use." These baser 
necessities of our nature, in short, which all other writers 
who have aimed at raising the imagination or touching 
the heart have kept studiously out of view, are osten- 20 
tatiously brought forward, and fondly dwelt on by the 
pathetic authors of Germany. 

We really cannot well account for this extraordinary 
taste. But we suspect it is owing to the importance that 
is really attached to those solid comforts and supplies of 25 
necessaries, by the greater part of the readers and writers 
of that country. Though there is a great deal of freedom 
in Germany, it operates less by raising the mass of the 
people to a potential equality with the nobles, than by 
securing to them their inferior and plebeian privileges ; 30 
and consists rather in the immunities of their incor- 
porated tradesmen, which may enable them to become 
rich as such, than in any general participation of national 
rights, by which they may aspire to dignity and elegance, 



172 WILHELM MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP. 

as well as opulence and comfort. Now, the writers, as 
well as the readers in that country, belong almost entirely 
to the plebeian and vulgar class. Their learned men are 
almost all wofully poor and dependent ; and the com- 
5 fortable burghers who buy entertaining books by the 
thousand at the Frankfort fair, probably agree with 
their authors in nothing so much as the value they 
set on those homely comforts to which their ambition 
is mutually limited by their condition ; and enter into no 
10 part of them so heartily as those which set forth their 
paramount and continual importance. 

It is time, however, that we should proceed to give 
some more particular account of the work which has 
given occasion to all these observations. 



MEMOIRS OF ZEHIR-ED-DIN MUHAMMED 
BABER, EMPEROR OF HINDUSTAN. 



Writte7i by himself, in the Jaghatai Tzirki, and translated, partly by the 
late John Leyde?i, Esq., M.D., partly by Williatn Erskine, Esq. 



This is a very curious, and admirably edited work. 
But the strongest impression which the perusal of it has 
left on our minds is the boundlessness of authentic 
history ; and, if we might venture to say it, the useless- 
ness of all history which does not relate to our own ^ 
fraternity of nations, or even bear, in some way or other, 
on our own present or future condition. 

We have here a distinct and faithful account of some 
hundreds of battles, sieges and great military expeditions, 
and a character of a prodigious number of eminent indi- lo 
viduals, — men famous in their day, over wide regions, 
for genius or fortune — poets, conquerers, martyrs — 
founders of cities and dynasties — authors of immortal 
works — ravagers of vast districts abounding in wealth 
and population. Of all these great personages and 15 
events, nobody in Europe, if we except a score or two 
of studious Orientalists, has ever heard before ; and it 
would not, we imagine, be very easy to show that we are 
any better for hearing of them now. A few curious 
traits, that happened to be strikingly in contrast with our 20 
own manners and habits, may remain on the memory of 
a reflecting reader — with a general confused recollection 
of the dark and gorgeous phantasmagoria. But no one, 



174 MEMOIRS OF BABER. 

we may fairly say, will think it worth while to digest or 
develope the details of the history ; or be at the pains to 
become acquainted with the leading individuals, and fix 
in his memory the series and connection of events. Yet 
5 the effusion of human blood was as copious — the display 
of talent and courage as imposing — the perversion of 
high moral qualities, and the waste of the means of 
enjoyment as unsparing, as in other long-past battles 
and intrigues and revolutions, over the details of which 

lo we still pore with the most unwearied attention ; and to 
verify the dates or minute circumstances of which, is still 
regarded as a great exploit in historical research, and 
among the noblest employments of human learning and 
sagacity. 

IS It is not perhaps very easy to account for the eager- 
ness with which we still follow the fortunes of Miltiades, 
Alexander, or Caesar — of the Bruce and the Black Prince, 
and the interest which yet belongs to the fields of Mara- 
thon and Pharsalia, of Crecy and Bannockburn, compared 

20 with the indifference, or rather reluctance, with which we 
listen to the details of Asiatic warfare — the conquests 
that transferred to the Moguls the vast sovereignties of 
India, or raised a dynasty of Manchew Tartars to the 
Celestial Empire of China. It will not do to say, that 

25 we want something nobler in character, and more exalted 
in intellect, than is to be met with among those murderous 
Orientals — that there is nothing to interest in the con- 
tentions of mere force and violence ; and that it requires 
no very fine-drawn reasoning to explain why we should 

30 turn with disgust from the story, if it had been preserved, 
of the savage affrays which have drenched the sands of 
Africa or the rocks of New Zealand — through long 
generations of murder — with the blood of their brutish 
population. This may be true enough of Madagascar 



MEMOIRS OF BABER, 175 

or Dahomy ; but it does not apply to the case before us. 
The nations of Asia generally — at least those composing 
its great states — were undoubtedly more polished than 
those of Europe, during all the period that preceded their 
recent connexion. Their warriors were as brave in the 5 
field, their statesmen more subtle and politic in the 
cabinet : In the arts of luxury, and all the elegancies of 
civil life, they were immeasurably superior ; in ingenuity 
of speculation — in literature — in social politeness — the 
comparison is still in their favour. 10 

It has often occurred to us, indeed, to consider what 
the effect would have been on the fate and fortunes of 
the world, if, in the fourteenth, or fifteenth century, 
when the germs of their present civilisation were first 
disclosed, the nations of Europe had been introduced 15 
to an intimate and friendly acquaintance with the great 
polished communities of the East, and had been thus led 
to take them for their masters in intellectual cultivation, 
and their models in all the higher pursuits of genius, 
polity, and art. The difference in our social and moral 20 
condition, it would not perhaps be easy to estimate : 
But one result, we conceive, would unquestionably have 
been, to make us take the same deep interest in their 
ancient story, which we now feel, for similar reasons, in 
that of the sterner barbarians of early Rome, or the more 25 
imaginative clans and colonies of immortal Greece. The 
experiment, however, though there seemed oftener than 
once to be some openings for it, was not made. Our 
crusading ancestors were too rude themselves to estimate 
or to feel the value of the oriental refinement which 30 
presented itself to their passing gaze, and too entirely 
occupied with war and bigotry, to reflect on its causes or 
effects ; and the first naval adventurers who opened up 
India to our commerce, were both too few and too far off 



176 MEMOIRS OF BABER. 

to communicate to their brethren at home any taste 
for the splendours which might have excited their own 
admiration. By the time that our intercourse with those 
regions was enlarged, our own career of improvement had 
5 been prosperously begun ; and our superiority in the art, 
or at least the discipline of war, having given us a signal 
advantage in the conflicts to which that extending inter- 
course immediately led, naturally increased the aversion 
and disdain with which almost all races of men are apt 

10 to regard strangers to their blood and dissenters from 
their creed. Since that time the genius of Europe has 
been steadily progressive, whilst that of Asia has been at 
least stationary, and most probably retrograde ; and the 
descendants of the feudal and predatory warriors of the 

15 West have at last attained a decided predominancy over 
those of their elder brothers in the East ; to whom, at 
that period, they were unquestionably inferior in elegance 
and ingenuity, and whose hostilities were then conducted 
on the same system with our own. They^ in short, have 

20 remained nearly where they were ; while we^ beginning 
with the improvement of our governments and military 
discipline, have gradually outstripped them in all the 
lesser and more ornamental attainments in which they 
originally excelled. 

25 This extraordinary fact of the stationary or degenerate 
condition of the two oldest and greatest families of man- 
kind — those of Asia and Africa, has always appeared 
to us a sad obstacle in the way of those who believe 
in the general progress of the race, and its constant 

30 advancement towards a state of perfection. Two or 
three thousand years ago, those vast communities were 
certainly in a happier and more prosperous state than 
they are now ; and in many of them we know that their 
most powerful and flourishing societies have been cor- 



^ MEMOIRS OF BABER. 177 

rapted and dissolved, not by any accidental or intrinsic 
disaster, like foreign conquest, pestilence, or elemental 
devastation, but by what appeared to be the natural 
consequences of that very greatness and refinement 
which had marked and rewarded their earlier exertions. 5 
In Europe, hitherto, the case has certainly been different : 
For though darkness did fall upon its nations also, after 
the lights of Roman civilisation were extinguished, it is 
to be remembered that they did not burn out of them- 
selves, but were trampled down by hosts of invading 10 
barbarians, and that they blazed out anew, with increased 
splendour and power, when the dulness of that superin- 
cumbent mass was at length vivified by their contact, and 
animated by the fermentation of that leaven which had 
all along been secretly working in its recesses. In 15 
Europe certainly there has been a progress : And the 
more polished of its present inhabitants have not only 
regained the place which was held of old by their illus- 
trious masters of Greece and Rome, but have plainly 
outgone them in the most substantial and exalted of 20 
their improvements. Far more humane and refined 
than the Romans — far less giddy and turbulent and 
treacherous than the Greeks, they have given a security 
to life and property that was unknown to the earlier ages 
of the world — exalted the arts of peace to a dignity 25 
with which they were never before invested ; and, by the 
abolition of domestic servitude, for the first time extended 
to the bulk of the population those higher capacities and 
enjoyments which were formerly engrossed by a few. By 
the invention of printing, they have made all knowledge, Z'^ 
not only accessible, but imperishable ; and by their im- 
provements in the art of war, have effectually secured 
themselves against the overwhelming calamity of barbar- 
ous invasion — the risk of subjugation by mere numerical 



178 MEMOIRS OF BABER. 

or animal force : Whilst the alternations of conquest and 
defeat amongst civilised communities, who alone can now 
be formidable to each other, though productive of great 
local and temporary evils, may be regarded on the whole 

5 as one of the means of promoting and equalising the 
general civilisation. Rome polished and enlightened all 
the barbarous nations she subdued — and was herself 
polished and enlightened by her conquest of elegant 
Greece. If the European parts of Russia had been 

10 subjected to the dominion of France, there can be no 
doubt that the loss of national independence would have 
been compensated by rapid advances both in liberality 
and refinement ; and if, by a still more disastrous, though 
less improbable contingency, the Moscovite hordes were 

15 ever to overrun the fair countries to the south-west of 
them, it is equally certain that the invaders would 
speedily be softened and informed by the union ; and 
be infected more certainly than by any other sort of 
contact, with the arts and knowledge of the vanquished. 

20 All these great advantages, however — this apparently 
irrepressible impulse to improvement — this security 
against backsliding and decay, seems peculiar to Europe,^ 
and not capable of being communicated, even by her, to 
the most docile races of the other quarters of the world : 

25 and it is really extremely difficult to explain, upon what 
are called philosophical principles, the causes of this 
superiority. We should be very glad to ascribe it to our 

1 When we speak of Europe, it will be understood that we speak, 
not of the land, but of the people — and include, therefore, all the 
settlements and colonies of that favoured race, in whatever quarter 
of the globe they may now be established. Some situations seem 
more, and some less, favourable to the preservation of the original 
character. The Spaniards certainly degenerated in Peru — and the 
Dutch perhaps in Batavia ; — but the English remain, we trust, 
unimpaired in America. 



MEMOIRS OF BABER. 179 

greater political Freedom : — and no doubt, as a secondary 
cause, this is among the most powerful ; as it is to the 
maintenance of that freedom that we are indebted for the 
self-estimation, the feeling of honour, the general equity 
of the laws, and the substantial security both from sudden 5 
revolution and from capricious oppression, which distin- 
guish our portion of the globe. But we cannot bring 
ourselves to regard this freedom as a mere accident in 
our history, that is not itself to be accounted for, as well 
as its consequences : And when it is said that our 10 
greater stability and prosperity is owing to our greater 
freedom, we are immediately tempted to ask, by what 
that freedom has itself been produced ? In the same 
way we might ascribe the superior mildness and humanity 
of our manners, the abated ferocity of our wars, and 15 
generally our respect for human life, to the influence of 
a Religion which teaches that all men are equal in the 
sight of God, and inculcates peace and charity as the 
first of our duties. But, besides the startling contrast 
between the profligacy, treachery, and cruelty of the 20 
Eastern Empire after its conversion to the true faith, and 
the simple and heroic virtues of the heathen republic, it 
would still occur to inquire, how it has happened that the 
nations of European descent have alone embraced the 
sublime truths, and adopted into their practice the mild 25 
precepts, of Christianity, while the people of the East 
have uniformly rejected and disclaimed them, as alien to 
their character and habits — in spite of all the efforts of 
the apostles, fathers, and martyrs, in the primitive and 
most effective periods of their preaching ? How, in 30 
short, it has happened that the sensual and sanguinary 
creed of Mahomet has superseded the pure and pacific 
doctrines of Christianity in most of those very regions 
where it was first revealed to mankind, and first 



i8o MEMOIRS OF BABER. 

established by the greatest of existing governments ? 
The Christian revelation is no doubt the most precious 
of all Heaven's gifts to the benighted world. But it is 
plain, that there was a greater aptitude to embrace and 

5 to profit by it in the European than in the Asiatic race. 
A free government, in like manner, is unquestionably the 
most valuable of all human inventions — the great 
safeguard of all other temporal blessings, and the main- 
spring of all intellectual and moral improvement : — But 

lo such a government is not the result of a lucky thought 
or happy casualty ; and could only be established among 
men who had previously learned both to relish the benefits 
it secures, and to understand the connexion between the 
means it employs and the ends at which it aims. 

15 We come then, though a little reluctantly, to the 
conclusion, that there is a natural and inherent difference 
in the character and temperament of the European and 
the Asiatic races — consisting, perhaps, chiefly in a 
superior capacity of patient and persevering thought in 

20 the former — and displaying itself, for the most part, in 
a more sober and robust understanding, and a more 
reasonable, principled, and inflexible morality. It is 
this which has led us, at once to temper our political 
institutions with prospective checks and suspicious provi- 

25 sions against abuses, and, in our different orders and 
degrees, to submit without impatience to those checks 
and restrictions ; — to extend our reasonings by repeated 
observation and experiment, to larger and larger conclu- 
sions — and thus gradually to discover the paramount 

30 importance of discipline and unity of purpose in war, 
and of absolute security to person and property in all 
peaceful pursuits — the folly of all passionate and vin- 
dictive assertion of supposed rights and pretensions, and 
the certain recoil of long-continued injustice on the heads 



MEMOIRS OF BABER. i8l 

of its authors — the substantial advantages of honesty 
and fair dealing over the most ingenious systems of 
trickery and fraud ; — and even — though this is the last 
and hardest, as well as the most precious, of all the 
lessons of reason and experience — that the toleration 5 
even of religious errors is not only prudent and merciful 
in itself, and most becoming a fallible and erring being, 
but is the surest and speediest way to compose religious 
differences, and to extinguish that most formidable 
bigotry, and those most pernicious errors, which are 10 
fed and nourished by persecution. It is the want of this 
knowledge, or rather of the capacity for attaining it, that 
constitutes the palpable inferiority of the Eastern races ; 
and, in spite of their fancy, ingenuity, and restless 
activity, condems them, it would appear irretrievably, to 15 
vices and sufferings, from which nations in a far ruder 
condition are comparatively free. But we are wandering 
too far from the magnificent Baber and his commentators, 
— and must now leave these vague and general specu- 
lations for the facts and details that lie before us. 20 



CHRONOLOGICAL LIST 

OF 

ESSAYS. 



PAGE 



Apr., 1808: Crabbe's Poems 53 

Jan., 1809 : Reliques of Robert Burns 26 

July, 1809: Miss Edgeworth's Tales 121 

Apr., 1810: Crabbe's Borough 63 

Aug., 1810: Scott's Lady of the Lake 37 

May, 181 1 : Alison on Taste 149 

Aug., 181 1: Ford's Dramatic Works i 

Nov., 1814: Wordsworth's Excursion 105 

Nov., 1814: Scott's Waverley 126 

Oct., 1815: Wordsworth's White Doe : 118 

Dec, 1816 : Byron's Childe Harold 94 

Mar., 1817 : Scott's Tales of my Landlord 132 

Aug., 1817 : Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespeare 21 

July, 1819: Crabbe's Tales of the Hall 'j'] 

Aug., 1820: Keats's Endymion 88 

Aug., 1825: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister 159 

June, 1827: Memoirs of Baber 173 



DATES IN JEFFREY'S LIFE. 



1773, Oct. 23, Jeffrey bom in Edinburgh. 
1 78 1 -9 1, studies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. 
1791-92, studies at Queen's College, Oxford. 
1792-93, attends law lectures in Edinburgh. 
1794, is admitted to the bar. 
1798, visits London ; returns to Edinburgh. 

1801, marries Miss Catherine Wilson. 

1802, publishes articles in the Alonthly Review. 

1802, Oct. 10, first number of the Edinburgh Review. 

1803, becomes editor of the Edinburgh Review at a salary of ;^300. 

1804, is making ;^ 2 40 at the bar. 

1805, his wife dies. 

1806, visits London; duel with Moore. 

18 1 3-1 4, visits America and marries Miss Wilkes. 

181 5, settles at Craigcrook, three miles north-west of Edinburgh. 

1829, elected dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Edinburgh. 

1829, resigns the editorship of the Edinburgh Review. 

1830, is made Lord Advocate. 

1 83 1, is elected to Parliament. 

1834, accepts a judgeship in the Court of Sessions; becomes Lord 

Jeffrey. 
1850, Jan. 26, death of Jeffrey. 

Dictiofiary of A^ational Biography. 



ENGLISH REVIEWS. 



1749, the Monthly Review ; Ralph Griffiths. 

1755, the first Edinburgh Review ; Adam Smith, Blair, Robertson. 

1756, the Critical Review ; Archibald Hamilton and Smollett. 
1756, the Literary Magazine or Universal Review ; Dr. Johnson ; 

contributor. * 

1793, ^^^ British Critic or Theological Review ; Archdeacon Nares. 
1802, the Edi7ibiirgh Review ; Jeffrey. 
1809, the Quarterly Review ; Gifford. 
1824, the West?ninster Review ; Bowring. 



NOTES 



1 19. Mr. Weber. Henry Weber was a learned and eccentric Ger- 
man who served Scott as amanuensis from 1804 to 18 13. Besides his 
edition of Ford he published an edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, a 
collection of early Metrical Romances, and a collection of Popular 
Romances of oriental origin. In 18 13 he went mad and tried to 
force Scott to fight a duel with pistols. He died in an asylum in 
1818. Cf. Lockhart's Life of Scott, Aug. 1804, and Jan. 1814. His 
edition of Ford is now worth remembering only as an early attempt 
to make the Elizabethan dramatists better known. Interest in these 
dramatists had begun to revive about 1800. In 1798 appeared 
Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions. In 1802 Charles Lamb 
published his John Woodvil, a play that unmistakably drew its in- 
spiration from the Elizabethans. In 1805 Gifford brought out his 
edition of Massinger. In 1808 Lamb published his Specimens of 
English Dramatic Poets. In 181 1 appeared Weber's Ford -aiVi^ from 
that date on editions followed rapidly. The tone of the Edinburgh 
Review toward this revival was ultimately very favorable. Lamb's 
John Woodvil had been contemptuously treated and his Specimens 
was passed over in silence. But on the appearance of Weber's Ford, 
Jeffrey hastened to use it as the text for a warmly eulogistic discourse 
on the Elizabethans. In his essay of 1820 on Keats he takes credit 
to himself for having swayed the popular taste toward these older 
models. Doubtless his essays were influential ; but it is equally 
certain that the Romantic current had been setting with all its force 
in the same direction. Coleridge and Hazlitt had lectured and writ- 
ten in honor of the age of Elizabeth, and the vogue of the Eliza- 
bethans was owing to far more important causes than even the ipse 
dixit of ** King Jamfray." Bulwer-Lytton explains the return to the 
older writers as an attempt to justify innovation by an appeal to pre- 
cedent. See his England and the English, bk. iv, chap. 2. 



1 88 . NOTES. 

2 30. The Reformation . . . but 07ie symptom. The essay on Ford 
is specially interesting because of Jeffrey's frequent use of the his- 
torical method. This mention of the Reformation is a case in point; 
later, he explains historically the prevalence of French fashions in 
English literature ; and still further on, he accounts for the English 
love of Shakspere as owing to the accommodation of Shakspere's 
*' forms of excellence " to " the peculiar character, temperament, 
and situation," of the English nation. The other essays of Jeffrey 
that best show his grasp of the historical method are those on 
Madame de Stael's De la Litterature, etc., and on Goethe's Wilhelm 
Meister. Madame de Stael's book was itself a plea for the use of 
the historical method in the study of literature ; she wished " to 
show that all the peculiarities in the literature of different ages and 
countries may be explained by a reference to the condition of 
society, and the political and religious institutions of each." The 
book appeared in 1812, but it is plain from this essay on Ford that 
Jeffrey was by no means indebted to it for an introduction to the 
historical method. 

5 17. Jeremy Taylor. Jeffrey shared his admiration for Taylor 
with the Romanticists. Coleridge's fondness for Taylor was pro- 
verbial. Peacock makes Mr. Flosky, who in Nightmare Abbey 
stands for Coleridge, appear on one occasion, " jeremitaylorically 
pathetic." 

8 20. This new Continental style. The pseudo-classicism of mod- 
ern German criticism. Cf. Korting, Grnndriss der Geschichte der 
englischen Litteratur, p. 272. 

12 16. Akenside a?id Gray. Jeffrey's sneering mention of Gray 
seems hard to explain. The decorative beauty of Gray's Odes, their 
combination of imaginative splendor with sanity of mood and free- 
dom from transcendental affectations, are the very qualities that 
might be expected to catch Jeffrey's applause. 

13 20. The mawkish tone of pastoral innocence. Cf. the attacks on 
Wordsworth in the essay on Crabbe's Poems, p. 58. and in the essays 
on the Excursion and the White Doe, pp. 105 and 118. Of these, 
the essay on Crabbe (1808) is the earliest. 

15 26. Forms of excellence . . . accommodated to their . . . char- 
acter. This view of the relativity of artistic excellence will be found 
more adequately expounded in the essay on Madame de Stael's De 
la Litterature, etc. (1812) " With regard to the author again, or artist 
of any other description, who pretends to bestow the pleasure, his 
object of course should be, to give as much, and to as many persons 



NOTES. 189 

as possible ; and especially to those who, from their rank and edu- 
cation, are likely to regulate the judgment of the remainder. It is 
his business, therefore, to ascertain what does please the greater part 
of such persons ; and to fashion his productions according to the 
rules of taste, which may be deduced from that discovery. Now, we 
humbly conceive it to be a complete and final justification for the 
whole body of the English nation, who understand French as well 
as English and yet prefer Shakespeare to Racine, just to state mod- 
estly and firmly, the fact of that preference ; and to declare, that 
their habits and tempers and studies and occupations, have been 
such as to make them receive far greater pleasure from the more 
varied imagery — the more flexible tone — the closer imitation of 
nature — the more rapid succession of incident, and vehement bursts 
of passion of the English author, than from the unvarying majesty 
— the elaborate argument — and epigrammatic poetry of the French 
dramatist. For the taste of the nation at large, we really cannot 
conceive that any other apology can be necessary." 

19 14. Shakespeare. Cf. Matthew Arnold : " Shakespeare him- 
self, divine as are his gifts, has not, of the marks of the Master, 
this one : perfect sureness of hand in his style. Alone of English 
poets, alone in English art, Milton has it." Mixed Essays., ed. 1883, 
p. 200. 

21 4. An encomium 07i Shakespeare. The book was published 
in 1817; 2d edition, 1818. It was dedicated to Charles Lamb. 
" Hazlitt received ;i^ioo for it. The first edition went off in six 
weeks; the sale of the second was spoilt, as he thought, by an attack 
in the * Quarterly Review.' For this and a later assault Hazlitt 
revenged himself by a vigorous letter to William Gifford." Diet, of 
Nat. Biog. § Hazlitt. 

21 14. Our own admiration. Jeffrey takes too much credit for 
his admiration of Shakspere ; even the eighteenth century was 
alive to Shakspere's merits. For a list of dates marking the 
course of the Shakspere revival in the eighteenth century, see 
Korting, Grundriss der Geschichte der englischen Litteratur, p. 313. 
Cf. Hettner, Geschichte der englischen Litteratur, p. 529. 

22 6. A fine sense of the beauties of the author. In this work of 
Hazlitt's, Jeffrey has chanced on a genuine piece of impressionistic 
criticism and he treats it on the whole very sympathetically. He 
himself never loiters over a poem, yields luxuriously to the mood it 
induces, and fashions a new bit of imaginative literature out of the 
dreams it suggests. He is much too responsible a person to practice 



190 NOTES. 

such intellectual vagrancy, but he looks on it in others tolerantly 
and even sympathetically. 

24 3. Relative to mental emotion. Cf. Selections, p. 91, 1. 27, 
p. 150, 1. 18, and p. 152. 

26 2. Stephen Duck (b. 1705, d. 1756). He was for many years 
a farm-laborer, but became interested in reading, got together a 
few books, and gained some familiarity with literature. About 1729 
he began to be known as a writer of verse. In 1730 he was 
brought to the notice of Queen Caroline, who made him keeper of 
one of her libraries and gave him a pension of ^30 a year. Later 
he took orders, preached for a time in Kew Chapel, and in 1751 
received a living in Surrey. In 1756, in a fit of despondency, he 
drowned himself in the Thames. He had the honor of having 
his poems edited, in 1736, by Joseph Spence, "late Professor of 
Poetry in the University of Oxford"; and "an account of the 
author" was prefixed, written in 1730, in which Spence gives many 
curious details about Duck's study and reading, his ideas on poetry, 
his methods of composition. A few lines from one of his earliest 
poems will illustrate the character of his effusions. The poem is 
addressed " to a gentleman who requested a copy of verses from the 
author": 

" I have before the Time prescrib'd by you, 
Expos'd my weak Production to your view ; 
Which may, I hope, have pardon at your hand, 
Because produc'd to light by your Command. 
Perhaps you might expect some finish'd Ode, 
Or sacred Song, to sound the Praise of God; 
A glorious thought and laudable ! " etc., etc. 

26 2. Thomas Dermody. He rivalled Chatterton in precocity 
and misfortunes, and surpassed him in learning, but had little 
poetic genius. He was born in County Clare, Ireland in 1775; 
at the age of nine he was assistant in Greek and Latin in his 
father's school, and before fourteen was thoroughly at home in 
Greek, Latin, French and ItaHan, and knew some Spanish. He was 
taken up by Henry Grattan, Bishop Percy and other influential men, 
but ruined all his chances by persistent dissipation. He lived in 
London for a time, where he finally died in destitution in 1802. A 
two-volume life of Dermody was published in 1806 and his complete 
poems appeared in 1807. His best work was done about 1791 in 
imitation of Bums. Such lines as the following, in memory of an 
old crony, might almost be mistaken for the Scotch poet's : 



NOTES. 191 

" No curate now can work thy throat, 
And alter clean thy jocund note ; 
Charon has plump'd thee in his boat, 
• And run ahead : 

My curse on death, the meddling sot ! 
Gay Johnny 's dead." 

A couple of stanzas from My Own Elegy are also worth quoting : 

" Gude faith ! with all thy roguish trick, 
Thy Pegasus has got a kick ; 
Flat as a tomb-stone, dumb as stick. 

Thou liest at last : 

God send, thou gang'st not to old Nick 

For frolics past ! " 

" I do remember thee right well ; 
Thou didst in witty pranks excel ; 
Can all thy deeds of sly note tell. 

Thou great verse-fighter ; 
But, ah ! auld Death has borne the bell, 

And bit the biter." 

32 10. German plays. Between 1796 and 181 5 the English stage 
was overrun with translations and adaptations of the plays of the 
German dramatist Kotzebue ; during these twenty years there were 
published no less than eighty-nine editions of one or another of his 
plays. Die Softnen-Jtmgfrau was perhaps the greatest favorite. 
Monk Lewis's translation, called Rolla, was published in 1797 and 
reached a second edition in 1799. Sheridan's adaption, Pizarro, was 
made in 1799 and reached its twenty-sixth edition in 1800. Mean- 
while there were also other fairly popular translations. Perhaps 
Kotzebue's next most popular play was Menschenhass und Reue, 
which, as the Stranger, remained for many years a favorite ; the part 
of Mrs. Haller was one of Mrs. Siddons's most famous impersonations. 
All these dramas indulged in much weak sentimentality, condemned, 
at least implicitly, conventional morals, and represented passion as its 
own justification. For the various translations of Kotzebue's works 
see the British Museum Catalogue. Probably these were the plays 
that Jeffrey had chiefly in mind, though he may even here be glancing 
at Schiller's Die Rduber, which he mentions a moment later. 
The earliest English account of Die Rduber (1781) was that given 
by Henry Mackenzie in a lecture before the Royal Society of Edin- 
burgh in 1788. The first translation of Die Rduber was made by 
A. F. Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, in 1792 ; 4th edition, 1800. Two 



192 NOTES. 

other translations appeared in 1799, and still a third in 1800. See 
the British Museum Catalogue. 

33 31. The heroics only of the hulks. Within a year the first 
two cantos of Childe Harold were published, and within five 
years the heroics of the hulks had become the favorite cant of all 
Europe. 

37. Second edition. The first edition of the Lady of the Lake 
was published in May, 1810, and consisted of 2,050 copies; four 
more editions, comprising 18,250 copies, followed in the same year. 
Lockhart's Life of Scott, 1st ed. II, 290. 

37 3. The race of popiclarity. The tone of faint praise in this 
article may have been in part prompted by Jeffrey's knowledge of 
the leading part Scott had taken in the establishment of the Tory 
Quarterly Review (Feb., 1809). At the same time, it should be 
remembered that Jeffrey's article on Marmion (1808) was fully as 
severe. " We must remind our readers," he says, in that article, *' that 
we never entertained much partiality for this sort of composition, 
and ventured on a former occasion to express our regret that an 
author endowed with such talents should consume them in imitations 
of obsolete extravagance, and in the representation of manners and 
sentiments in which none of his readers can be supposed to take 
much interest, except the few who can judge of their exactness. 
To write a modern romance of chivalry seems to be much such a 
phantasy as to build a modern abbey or an English pagoda." A 
day or two after the appearance of the Marmion article Jeffrey dined 
at Scott's house. He was treated by his host with precisely the old- 
time frankness and friendship. But as he was bowing himself out 
Mrs. Scott took her woman's revenge by saying in her broken 
English, "Well, good night, Mr. Jeffrey — dey tell me you have 
abused Scott in de Review, and I hope Mr. Constable has paid you 
very well for writing it." Lockhart's Scott, ist ed., II, 149. The 
little sneer is interesting historically as illustrating the feeling prev- 
alent for many years that paid reviewing was a disgraceful trade, 
and that the reviewer was a bookseller's hack. It was his fear of 
this prejudice that had made Jeffrey hesitate about becoming editor 
of the Review ; soon after accepting the editorship he writes tartly 
to Horner, "Do not fancy that I am to take your orders as if I 
were a shopman of Constable's." In point of fact, it was owing to 
the business policy of the Edinbtirgh Review, and to the high 
character of the contributors it secured, that this prejudice against 
writing review-articles for pay was finally broken down. 



NOTES. 193 

Ostensibly the publication of the Marmion essay made no differ- 
ence in the personal relations between Jeffrey and Scott. Never- 
theless, after this date Scott sent no more articles to the Edinburgh ; 
and in about six months he was in active correspondence with 
Canning and Gifford about the establishment of a new Tory Review. 
The first number of the Quarterly Review was dated February, 1809. 

44 8. Song by a person of quality. 

" I said to my heart between sleeping and waking, 
Thou wild thing, that always art leaping or aching, 
What black, brown, or fair, in what clime, in what nation, 
By turns has not taught thee a pit-a-pat-ation ? 

Thus accused, the wild thing gave this sober reply : 
See the heart without motion, though Celia pass by ! 
Not the beauty she has, or the wit that she borrows, 
Gives the eye any joys, or the heart any sorrows. 

When our Sappho appears, she whose wit 's so refined, 
I am forced to applaud with the rest of mankind ; 
Whatever she says, is with spirit and fire ; 
Ev'ry word I attend ; but I only admire. 

Prudentia as vainly would put in her claim, 
Ever gazing on heaven, though man is her aim : 
'T is love, not devotion, that turns up her eyes ; 
Those stars of this world are too good for the skies. 

But Cloe, so lively, so easy, so fair. 
Her wit so genteel, without art, without care ; 
When she comes in my way, the motion, the pa;n, 
The leapings, the achings, return all again. 

O wonderful creature ! a woman of reason ! 
Never grave out of pride, never gay out of season ! 
When so easy to guess who this angel should be, 
Would one think Mrs. Howard ne'er dreamt it was she.?" 

— Swift's Works, Scott's 2d ed., XIII, 331. 

By the " person of quality " is said to have been meant the Earl 
of Peterborough. 

44 31. Those who first sought to excite it. It is in such passages 
as this that Jeffrey's imperfect grasp of the historical method is most 
apparent. Of course, he utterly fails to realize here the conditions 
under which the Earliest poetry was produced. He conceives of the 
first makers of verse as men of the world, polished and educated 
and reflective, consciously choosing their subjects and their methods 
with a view to producing the best possible effects. For a suggestive 



194 NOTES. 

account of the conditions under which the earliest poetry of a race 
or tribe is produced, see Wilhelm Scherer's Poetik, pp. 73-117. 
Cf. the Introd2utio7i to Professor Gummere's selection of English 
and Scottish Ballads (Athenaeum Press Series), pp. xxxv ff. 

45 16. Some of them . . . set themselves. The chances seem to 
be that in this rather superficial contrast between modern and ancient 
poetry, Jeffrey had three or four very recent poets in mind as repre- 
senting his classes of "after-poets." By those who "set themselves 
to observe and delineate both characters and external objects with 
greater minuteness and fidelity " he probably meant Cowper and 
Crabbe ; by those who "analyze more carefully the mingling passions 
of the heart, etc.," he probably meant Campbell ; and the poets of 
the third sort, who distort nature or dissect it, were doubtless the 
Lake poets. " Fantastical " is his favorite sneer for Wordsworth. 
Cf. the essay on Mrs. Hemans, where he speaks of " the fantastical 
emphasis of Wordsworth," and the essay on Crabbers Poems, p. 57, 
where he asserts that Wordsworth and his associates are trying to 
bring back " the fantastical oddity and puling childishness of 
Withers, Quarles, or Marvel." 

46 7. Modern sculpture. The superficiality of Jeffrey's art criti- 
cism is most glaring when we contrast such passages as this with 
the best work of German or French critics or with later English 
criticism. Jeffrey's characterization of ancient and of modern poetry 
should be compared with Hegel's treatment of the same subject in 
the Introduction to his Philosophy of Eine Art (Bosanquet's trans- 
lation) ; and the apologetic suggestion of a likeness between modem 
poetry and modem sculpture should be contrasted with Hegel's 
analysis of the two arts and of their relative fitness to give imaginative 
expression to modern life. Jeffrey seems never to have attempted 
any thorough comparative study of the fine arts with a view to 
determining their relative limitations and scope. 

52 3. The sudden light and colour of some moral affection. Doubt- 
less Scott's descriptions are, as Jeffrey says, atmospheric and 
suggestive of moods. But the suggestion usually depends on the 
time of day, or the season, or historical associations, or the incidents 
of the actual story. A morning landscape breathes hope and 
cheerful confidence ; an autumn landscape is wan and dispiriting ; 
a famous battle-field kindles a glow of patriotism. These moods 
are very simple and the associations very obvious. As for any 
more complex moods or subtler associations, we must look else- 
where for them than in Scott. 



NOTES. 195 

53 5. We rejoice in his resurrection. The same reasons that led 
Jeffrey to republish so many of his essays on Crabbe seem to justify 
rather generous selections from those essays. The reasons are given 
in Jeffrey's note, p. 53. Crabbe's unpopularity has been more than 
made up to him by the devotion of his chosen admirers. ** Women 
and young people never will like him, I think ; but I believe every 
thinking man will like him more as he grows older." Letters and 
Literary Remains of Edward EitzGerald, ed. Wright, I, p. 398. 
This was the verdict of one of Crabbe's most patient and insinuating 
advocates, Edward FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. 
Jeffrey's admiration for Crabbe was probably somewhat stimulated 
by detestation of what seemed to him unendurable affectation in 
Wordsworth's treatment of every-day life and by the desire to make 
Wordsworth's mysticism more grotesque by contrasting it sharply 
with Crabbe's common sense. 

54 1. Upwards of twenty years. Cf. the Preface to the third 
edition of Crabbe's Poems, London, 1808 : "About twenty-five years 
since was published a Poem called The Library ; which, in no long 
time, was followed by two others, The Village and The Newspaper. 
These with a few alterations and additions are here reprinted ; and 
are accompanied by a Poem of greater length, and several shorter 
attempts, now, for the first time, before the public." The "Poem 
of greater length " was The Parish Register. 

57 28. Whimsical and iinheard-of beings. Cf. Coleridge, Bio- 
graphia Literaria, chap. 14: "The thought suggested itself . . . 
that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the 
one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, super- 
natural ; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting 
of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would 
naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. . . . For 
the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life ; the 
characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every 
village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind 
to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves." 
Jeffrey's words in the text are almost a parody, unconscious, of 
course, on this passage. Jeffrey's " unheard-of beings " and " in- 
credible situations " are Coleridge's " incidents and agents ... in 
part at least supernatural": and Jeffrey's "strained and exaggerated 
moralization " is what Coleridge and Wordsworth regard as the 
natural commentary of " a meditative and feeling mind " on " subjects 
. . . chosen from ordinary life." Coleridge's Ancient Mariner seemed 



196 NOTES. 

to Jeffrey an " unheard-of being," and Wordsworth's Resolution and 
Independence, with its interpretation of the leech-gatherer's life, 
seemed full of " strained and exaggerated moralization." 

58 11. Their own capricious feelings. It is to the subjectivity of 
Wordsworth's poetry that Jeffrey takes exception. Wordsworth, 
he insists, gives us never the actual fact but always his somewhat 
grotesque reaction on the fact. He puts before us, not the actual 
leech-gatherer of real life, but a fantastical creature into which the 
leech-gatherer is transformed when seen through the poet's mists 
of emotion. 

60 13. A lover trots away. This is, of course, an utterly unfair 
account of the famous little poem, " Strange fits of passion 
have I known." The poem illustrates the way in which an over- 
mastering mood colors all nature with its own hue and wrests all 
natural sights and sounds into symbols. The moon setting over 
his mistress's cottage seems to the lover in the poem to portend 
disaster. A similar interpretation of nature in terms of an over- 
mastering mood may be found in Tennyson's Maud, xiv, 4 : " I 
heard no sound where I stood." 

61 6. An old nurse, . . . or a fnonk, or parish clerk is always at 
hand. These are the conventional spokesmen for tales of misery. 
Jeffrey pleads for conventions and condemns Wordsworth's realism. 
He regards poetry as something artificial, to be consciously wrought 
out in harmony with laws and precedents and conventions. Jeffrey 
never wholly escaped from this shallow view of the poet's art. Cf. 
Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, where he takes to 
task the " men who talk of Poetry as of a matter of amusement and 
idle pleasure ; who will converse with us as gravely about a taste for 
Poetry, as they express it, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a 
taste for rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry." Wordsworth's 
Poems, Macmillan, 1890, p. 855. 

68 15. Little fragments of sympathy. Cf. Jeffrey's essay on 
the Nature and Principles of Taste, pp. 151-2. 

88. John Keats. This article was published in August, 1820. 
The notorious attacks on Keats had appeared about two years 
earlier in Blackwood's Magazine and in the Quarterly Review. That 
in Blackwood'' s is supposed to have been by Lockhart ; at any rate 
the article made use of information about Keats's early life that 
Bailey, an intimate friend of Keats, had supplied in confidence to 
Lockhart in the hope of securing for Keats fair treatment in Black- 
wood'' s. The article in the Quarterly has been usually attributed to 



NOTES. 197 

the editor, William Gifford. The Blackwood article is much the 
more savage and abusive, but the Quarterly article has been longer 
and more widely remembered because of Shelley's allusions to it in 
Ailonais, and because of Byron's well-known epigram : 
" Who kill'd John Keats ? 
' I,' says the Quarterly, 
So savage and Tartarly, 
' 'T was one of my feats.' " 

The story that Keats's suffering under these attacks sent him into 
a decline is no longer credited. See Colvin's Life of Keats, chap. 6, 
and cf. the very careful review of all the evidence in the case in 
Rossetti's Life of Keats, chap. 5. Mr. Rossetti thinks that Jeffrey's 
article in the Editiburgh had an important influence in righting 
Keats with the public. 

884. That itnitation of our old writers. Qi. 1-19. 

8819. The flotvers of poetry. Cf. note, 96-8, and Introduction, 
p. xxii. Keats's poetry lends itself more readily than the poetry of 
Wordsworth, Shelley, or Byron to interpretation as merely decorative 
work. It is in this way that Jeffrey conceives of it, and hence he can 
reconcile himself to its richness and gorgeousness and patronize it 
with a safe conscience. He finds it no more revolutionary than the 
poetry of Campbell or Moore. In point of fact, Keats's Roman- 
ticism was a vital principle, as has been shown by his influence in 
developing modern aestheticism. 

89 17. Imagination . . . subordinate to reason. Cf. Brandl's 
account of the process of poetic composition : " A deeply felt 
situation is the starting point. Kindred representations join, often 
by means of external associations, and add new features, and thus 
the image grows. The combining power consists in an excitation of 
feeling, supported by a richly endowed memory. The understanding 
has only to watch that no inconsistency creeps in. To which side of 
these two qualities the balance shall incline depends chiefly on the 
taste of the day. In the pseudo-classical era feeling was too much 
controlled by reflection. The original mental picture did not 
spontaneously grow, but had to be helped on by conscious, 
capricious aids, according to mechanical rules; so that the work, 
despite the careful arrangement of the parts, gives rather the 
impression of an artificial than of an organic product. The writers 
themselves felt this, and selected by preference subjects addressed 
to the understanding — such as moral poems and satires. The 
Romantic school, on the other hand, failed from not being critical 



198 NOTES. 

enough." Brandl's Life of Coleridge (Lady Eastlake's translation), 
chap. 4. Cf. Dilthey's Das Schaffen des Dichters, in Philosophische 
Aufsdtze, Eduard Zeller . . . gewidmet, Leipzig, 1887. 

90 15. Auy one who would . . . represent the whole poetn as 
despicable. Of course, it is to the author of the Quarterly article on 
Keats that Jeffrey is here paying his compliments. 

90 29. The true genius of English poetry. Cf. the passage on 
Pope, p. 10, and that on Shakspere, p. 15. These passages mark 
unmistakably Jeffrey's advance beyond the point of view of the 
pseudo-classicists. Poetry must be something more than rhymed 
rhetoric ; it must be the work of the imagination. So far Jeffrey 
was willing to go with the Romanticists in their criticisms on the 
pseudo-classicists. He also admitted that poetry might well enough 
take us into a land of enchantment, as it often does in the works of 
the Elizabethans. But when a poet tried to find this land of 
enchantment in the very midst of every-day life by looking on 
common things merely as symbols of an infinitely beautiful spiritual 
world, Jeffrey at once refused to follow; his common sense rebelled; 
he was too much of a man of the world to tolerate transcendentalism. 

91 27. Those jnysterious relations, etc. Cf. Selections, pp. 1 50 
and 152. 

94. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The first and second cantos 
had been published in 181 2. 

95 15. The Lake poets. Jeffrey has an inkling here of an 
important truth that he never thoroughly grasped. Byron's madly 
egoistic revolt and Wordsworth's high spiritual conservatism were 
alike attempts to give life greater richness of coloring and wealth of 
emotion than it had had in the eighteenth century. The full 
significance of this similarity of aim Jeffrey never realized; but he 
noted the greater imaginativeness of style, intensity of temper, and 
fervor of utterance that are characteristic of both poets and that 
distinguish their portrayal of life from that of the pseudo-classicists. 

96 8. Lofty flights. This is another of those tricks of speech 
that betray Jeffrey's theory of poetry. Certain subjects, he implies, 
furnish the'poet with more or less favorable "occasions" for making 
verse; and on these "occasions" the poet "takes his flights." If 
he has "good taste," these occasions will never be "mean," particu- 
larly in case his " flight " is to be " lofty." Poetry is, in other words, 
merely the pretty pastime of clever men. Cf. 100-27 and 103-4. 

99 33. A moral teacher. This essay is a good illustration of 
Jeffrey's criticism of literature from the ethical point of view. 



NOTES. 199 

Jeffrey boasted of having first made this kind of criticism current in 
England. Cf. the Introduction, p. xxv, and note p. 155-16. The 
ethical critic of to-day pushes his analysis far beyond the point where 
Jeffrey stopped. Compare with this essay of Jeffrey's Mr. John 
Morley's essay on Byron in his Critical Miscellanies, vol. I. Jeffrey 
is content with an analysis of Byron's typical hero and a warning 
against the type. Mr. Morley shows why the type originated, and 
why it was so popular. Jeffrey regards Byron's ethics as merely the 
expression, of the poet's own self-will ; Mr. Morley points out the 
connection between Byron's ethics and the social conditions in 
the midst of which the poet wrote, and brings the spirit of Byron's 
work into intelligible relation with the spirit of the times. 

100 27. Necessary agents. This passage is a perfect illustration 
of the view of poetry, described in note 96-8. A poet "deals in 
heroes," he has certain " extraordinary adventures to detail," and he 
must " bring about the catastrophe of his story " properly. In other 
words, a poet merely invents more or less mechanically an ingenious 
fable for the delectation of his readers, and clothes this story in 
richly imaginative language. 

101 17. We had the good fortune. Jeffrey discreetly omits all 
mention of the first encounter between the Edinburgh Revie^v and 
Lord Byron. Brougham's contemptuous article on Byron's Hours of 
Idleness had appeared in the Edinburgh in 1808, and had provoked 
from Byron in 1809 the fiercest and most effective satire in English 
since Churchill, English Bards and Scotch Reviezvers. " As to the 
Edinburgh Reviewers " Byron says in his Preface to the second 
edition (Oct. 1809), "it would indeed require a Hercules to crush 
the Hydra; but if the author succeeds in merely 'bruising one of 
the heads of the serpent,' though his own hand should suffer in the 
encounter, he will be amply satisfied." It should be noted, how- 
ever, that Jeffrey himself did not fare badly in the Satire : he is 
termed, and justly termed, "self-constituted judge of poesy," is 
charged with a reckless eagerness for clever articles, true or false, 
and, as arch-critic of his time, has to suffer indirectly when Byron 
sneers at the typical reviewer. Otherwise, he comes off with little 
damage. Byron's account of the qualities of the successful reviewer 
should be noted : 

" A man must serve his term to every trade 
Save censure — critics all are ready made. 
Take hackneyed jokes from Miller, got by rote. 
With just enough of learning to misquote ; 



2 00 NOTES. 

A mind well skill'd to find or forge a fault ; 
A turn for punning, call it Attic salt ; 
To Jeffrey go, be silent and discreet 
His pay is just ten sterling pounds per sheet : 
Fear not to lie, 'twill seem a sharper hit ; 
Shrink not from blasphemy, 'twill pass for wit ; 
Care not for feeling — pass your proper jest, 
And stand a critic, hated, yet caress'd." 

101 26. Official observer. Jeffrey's various descriptions of his 
duties as critic are worth careful comparison. Here he 'speaks of 
himself as merely an ofificial observer, bound to watch lest the public 
overlook some good thing. In the essay on Scott's Lady of the 
Lake, p. 37, he pretends " to be privileged, in ordinary cases, to 
foretell the ultimate reception of all claims on public admiration." 
In his essay on Scott's novels in 1817, he professes to believe it 
impossible ' to affect by any observations of his, the j udgment which 
had been passed upon ' those works of fiction. Similarly, in the 
present instance he deems it hardly worth while to comment on 
Byron's poems, inasmuch as the world has already pronounced so 
decisively in their favor. From all these passages it is plain that 
Jeffrey regarded himself as having authority chiefly as the represent- 
ative of the best taste of the most cultivated people ; he was the 
spokesman of the intelligent public. Whenever, then, he felt this 
intelligent public behind him he played the austere and pitiless judge 
to perfection. It was in this high mood that he dealt with Words- 
worth ; " This will never do," he declares of the Excursion ; later, 
he laments Wordsworth's disregard of " all the admonitions he has 
received " ; and he finally refuses to " rescind the severe sentence " 
he has passed on Wordsworth's work. In these attacks Jeffrey 
feels that he has " the world " behind him, and it is as the highest 
exponent of the most cultivated taste that he claims authority. In 
this spirit he later takes Goethe to task. His confidence in his 
public leads him to substitute abuse for argument. He accuses 
Goethe of " affectation," " vulgarity," " childishness," " mere folly," 
"sheer nonsense," etc., etc. These terms are merely violent ways 
of expressing dislike ; they have no scientific value ; they are not 
open to discussion. In such essays, Jeffrey is the dogmatic critic, 
pure and simple ; he dogmatizes boldly because he is sure of his 
public ; he dogmatizes picturesquely because he has humor, infinite 
readiness in illustration, and a sparkling style ; and he dogmatizes 
serviceably because of his acuteness, his tact, and his close sympathy 



NOTES. 20 1 

with the public he serves. It was a great relief and a great advan- 
tage to the public of Jeffrey's day to know just how they felt about 
the books that they read ; and it was part of Jeffrey's mission to 
tell them this picturesquely and amusingly. 

103 4. Great force of writing. In such passages as this Jeffrey 
fails to appreciate the organic relation between literature and life. 
He regards Byron as catching the popular taste by clever devices of 
style ; he does not see that Byron was the product of his time and 
that he received so eager a welcome because he was giving utterance 
to ideas and feelings that had long been fermenting in the minds and 
hearts of many people. If Jeffrey had thoroughly grasped this 
relation between author and public, his theory of art and his practice 
of criticism would both have been modified. He would have got 
beyond the view of poetry that makes it a mere pastime ; and in 
criticising contemporary poetry he would have considered it in its 
relation to social conditions and as the expression of a spirit whose 
presence must be historically accounted for. 

105 1. This will never do. These words have done Jeffrey's 
reputation an infinite deal of damage. Wordsworth finally con- 
quered the public, and Jeffrey's epigrammatic contempt became for 
Wordsworth's admirers a mark of the critic's irredeemable shallow- 
ness. Of late years, however, opinion has been shifting away from 
Wordsworth ; the estimate of Wordsworth's poetry that Mr. Court- 
hope has included in chap. 16 of his Life of Pope, tallies in many 
respects with Jeffrey's estimate. Mr. Courthope takes exception 
to Wordsworth's constant interpretation of life in terms of his own 
quaint emotion and to his persistent neglect of the point of view 
and the moods of the vast majority of cultivated people. These 
are, of course, precisely the objections Jeffrey urges on pages 
109-10. On the whole, then, a fair-minded reader of Jeffrey's 
essay, particularly if he be no devotee of transcendentalism, will 
find it sound in many of its strictures, and irresistibly "droll in 
its play upon the poet's solemn egotism. The article certainly 
fails to do Wordsworth justice ; but that it is totally wrong in 
its cavilling, as the poet's admirers used to urge, no critic now will 
assert. 

108 21. The admonitions he has received. This is the very tone 
and manner of pedagogic criticism. The author is a schoolboy with 
an ill-written exercise and the critic is the master or " monitor " who 
rates him for his l>lunders. In the essays he selected for preserva- 
tion Jeffrey is rarely so magisterial. Cf. 101-26. 



2 02 NOTES. 

109 29. Prevailing impressions. Cf. Courthope's Life of Pope, 
chap. i6 : " The two main points of difference between the classical 
and the modern romantic schools are here brought into vivid relief. 
Pope, the antagonist of the metaphysical school, had taught that the 
essence of poetry was the presentation, in a perfect form, of imagin- 
ative materials common to the poet and the reader — * What oft was 
thought, but ne'er so well expressed.' Wordsworth maintained, on 
the contrary, that matter, not in itself stimulating to the general 
imagination, might become a proper subject for poetry if glorified by 
the imagination of the poet." 

110 6. '■^ An occasional reference to what will be thozight of 
them.^^ Cf. Keats's assertion : " When I am writing for myself for 
the mere sake of the moment's enjoyment, perhaps nature has its 
course with me — but a Preface is written to the Public. ... I 
never wrote one single line of Poetry with the least shadow of public 
thought." Letters of fohn Keats, April 9, 1818. Cf. also Sydney 
Dobell's Thoughts on Art, p. 48 : '* Poetry ... is the expression of 
a mind according to its own laws ; Rhetoric is the expression of a 
mind according to the laws of its Hearer." Wordsworth rejected 
emphatically the conventional taste of the world as a standard of 
poetic excellence. Cf. his letter to Lady Beaumont, May 21, 1807 • 
" It is impossible that any expectations can be lower than mine 
concerning the immediate effect of this little work upon what is 
called the public. I do not here take into consideration the envy 
and malevolence, and all the bad passions which always stand in the 
way of a work of any merit from a living poet ; but merely think of 
the pure, absolute, honest ignorance in which all worldlings of every 
rank and situation must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, 
feelings, and images, on which the life of my poems depends. The 
things which I have taken, whether from within or without, what 
have they to do with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door 
to door, ft-om street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr. Pitt 
or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster 
election or the borough of Iloniton ? In a word — for I cannot stop 
to make my way through the hurry of images that present them- 
selves to me — what have they to do with endless talking about 
things nobody cares anything for except as far as their own vanity is 
concerned, and this with persons they care nothing for but as their 
y2iva\.^ ox selfishness is concerned? — What have they to do (to say 
all at once) with a life without love ? . . . It is an awful truth, that 
there neither is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry among 



NOTES. 203 

nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish to live, in 
the broad light of the world — among those who either are, or are 
striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society." 
Christopher Wordsworth's Memoirs of Wordsworth, Boston, 1851, 

I» 333- 

111 11. A settled perversity of taste. What is unpardonable in 
Jeffrey is not his rejection of Wordsworth's transcendentalism but 
his failure to comprehend it. He insists on regarding it either as a 
mere affectation of singularity for the sake of effect, or as an inex- 
plicable mental aberration. Apparently he never made a serious 
effort to understand Wordsworth's theory of poetry or theory of 
life. He never examined Wordsworth's work in a scientific spirit 
and with the simple purpose of mastering Wordsworth's ideas. In 
such essays as this the injurious effects of the dogmatic spirit in 
criticism are most unmistakable. 

113 10. The old familiar one. In this passage Jeffrey disregards 
all that is genuinely distinctive in Wordsworth's new poetical Pan- 
theism, and makes of him merely a somewhat quaint exponent of 
the old-time view of the mechanical relation of the universe to a great 
First Cause. Neglecting entirely Wordsworth's doctrine of the 
immanence of God in nature, Jeffrey, of course, failed to understand 
his mystical interpretation of nature and found it merely a mass of 
" moral and devotional ravings." 

118 The White Doe. Wordsworth's explanation of his aim in this 
poem should be read in connection with Jeffrey's criticism. " The 
subject being taken from feudal times has led to its being compared 
to some of Walter Scott's poems that belong to the same age and 
state of society. The comparison is inconsiderate. Sir Walter 
pursued the customary and very natural course of conducting an 
action, presenting various turns of fortune, to some outstanding 
point on which the mind might rest as a termination or catastrophe. 
The course I attempted to pursue is entirely different. Everything 
that is attempted by the principal personages in * The White Doe ' 
fails, so far as its object is external and substantial. So far as it is 
moral and spiritual it succeeds. . . . The anticipated beatification, if 
I may say so, of [the heroine's] mind, and the apotheosis of 'the 
companion of her solitude, are the points at which the Poem aims, 
and constitute its legitimate catastrophe, far too spiritual a one for 
instant or widely-spread sympathy, but not therefore the less-fitted 
to make a deep and permanent impression upon that class of minds 
who think and feel more independently, than the many do, of the 



2 04 NOTES. 

surfaces of things and interests transitory because belonging more to 
the outward and social forms of life than to its internal spirit." 
Christopher Wordsworth's Memoirs of Wordsworth^ chap. 36. 

122 18. The impenetrable armour of its conjunct audacity. The 
phrase is unusually epigrammatic for Jeffrey, who, despite his repu- 
tation among his contemporaries for brilliancy and sparkle of style, 
rarely gives his readers a phrase they can quote. 

127 12. True to Nature. To-day Scott's sins against truth are a 
favorite topic with the realists : in Jeffrey's day Scott seemed " true 
to nature throughout," and was praised for " copying from actual 
existences." This well illustrates how relative a matter is realism in 
fiction : one man's truth is another man's lie. 

131 20. Mr. Scott. This good guess must duly be noted as an 
illustration of Jeffrey's acuteness. 

133 6. Works of fiction. Jeffrey's apologies for treating novels as 
serious literature are historically interesting. lie has himself alluded 
to these apologies and explained them in his preface to those of his 
essays that deal with novels and tales. 

" As I perceive I have, in some of the following papers, made a sort of 
apology for seeking to direct the attention of my readers to things so insig- 
nificant as Novels, it may be worth while to inform the present generation 
that, iti my youth, writings of this sort were rated very low with us — scarcely 
allowed indeed to pass as part of a nation's permanent literature — and 
generally deemed altogether unworthy of any grave critical notice. Nor, in 
truth — in spite of Cervantes and Le Sage — and Marivaux, Rousseau, and 
Voltaire abroad — and even our own Richardson and Fielding at home — 
would it have been easy to controvert that opinion, in our England, at the 
time : For certainly a greater mass of trash and rubbish never disgraced the 
press of any country, than the ordinary Novels that filled and supported our 
circulating libraries, down nearly to the time of Miss Edgeworth's first 
appearance. There had been, the Vicar of Wakefield, to be sure, before ; and 
Miss Burney's Evelina and Cecilia — and Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, and 
some bolder and more varied fictions of the Misses Lee. But the staple of 
our Novel market was, beyond imagination, despicable : and had consequently 
sunk and degraded the whole department of literature, of which it had 
usurped the name. 

" All this, however, has since been signally, and happily, changed ; and that 
rabble rout of abominations driven from our confines for ever. The Novels 
of Sir Walter Scott are, beyond all question, the most remarkable productions 
of the present age ; and have made a sensation, and produced an effect, all 
over Europe, to which nothing parallel can be mentioned since the days of 
Rousseau and Voltaire; while, in our own country, they have attained a 
place, inferior only to that which must be filled for ever by the unapproach- 



NOTES. 205 

able glory of Shakespeare. With the help, no doubt, of their political revolu- 
tions, they have produced, in France, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Paul de Kock, 
etc., the Promessi S/osi in Italy — and Cooper, at least, in America. — In 
England, also, they have had imitators enough ; in the persons of Mr. James, 
Mr. Lover, and others. But the works most akin to them in excellence liave 
rather, I think, been related as collaterals than as descendants. Miss Edge- 
worth, indeed, stands more in the line of their ancestry; and I take Miss 
Austen and Sir E. L. Bulwer to be as intrinsically original; — as well as the 
great German writers, Goethe; Tieck, Jean Paul Richter, etc. Among them, 
however, the honour of this branch of literature has at any rate been 
splendidly redeemed ; — and now bids fair to maintain its place, at the head 
of all that is graceful and instructive in the productions of modern genius." 

136 24. Graceful and ge7itle7nan-like pri7iciples. In such passages 
as this Jeffrey's powers of analysis and of quick and sure generaliza- 
tion come out very strikingly. This account of the ethics of the 
author of the five new anonymous novels tallies perfectly with the 
conclusions that careful study of Scott's complete works and life 
has established as regards his ideas of conduct. These essays on 
Scott are examples of Jeffrey's best manner. He is confident with- 
out being supercilious, severe without being captious or harsh ; his 
alertness and sureness of touch are conspicuous, as are also the 
swiftness and eager variety of his style ; the insight into the sources 
of the author's power, the analysis of methods, and the ready 
appreciation of general effects are all characteristic of Jeffrey's best 
critical work ; and finally his interpretation of the ethical spirit of 
Scott's novels is just and suggestive, and illustrates the kind of literary 
discussion in which Jeffrey felt himself most original and effective. 

138 25. So tai?ie and mawkish. Jeffrey here recognizes the limita- 
tion in Scott's genius that Scott himself confessed to in his well- 
known eulogy on Jane Austen : "The big bow-wow strain I can do 
myself, like any now going ; but the exquisite touch which renders 
ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the 
truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." Scott's 
Diary in Lockhart's* Zz/^ of Scott, March 14, 1826. 

149 1. These criticisms. In the opening pages of this essay 
Jeffrey has considered two possible views of Beauty : first, that 
Beauty is a special quality inherent in all beautiful objects, and that 
this quality is recognized by a special sense or faculty called the 
power of taste ; secondly, that the Beautiful is merely the agreeable. 
The first theory he finds untenable because of men's conflicting 
judgments about beauty. If beauty were, like color, a simple quality, 
perceived directly by a peculiar sense, all men ought to agree in their 



2o6 NOTES. 

perceptions of beauty as they agree in their perceptions of color ; a 
beautiful object ought to force its beauty on a man's sense of beauty 
as unmistakably and individually as a colored object forces its color 
on his sense of sight. In point of fact, men differ irreconcilably, not 
simply as to the degree or kind of beauty in a given object, but as to 
whether it has beauty at all. Hence, Jeffrey contends, Beauty cannot 
be a simple quality perceived by a single sense. Nor, in the 
second place, can the Beautiful be merely the agreeable. For it is 
plain on a moment's thought, that there are countless objects, such 
as sugar, an easy chair, an old friend, which are agreeable without 
being beautiful. After disposing briefly of these two impossible 
theories of Beauty, Jeffrey propounds his own theory in a single 
sentence ; that sentence is not worth repeating, inasmuch as Jeffrey 
at once expounds his theory in the second paragraph of the 
extract in the text. Finally, Jeffrey takes up historically the most 
important theories of Beauty from the times of the Greeks to his 
own day, summarizes each, and suggests its shortcomings. It is at 
this point that the extract in the text begins. 

149 8. Mr. Alison's. Rev. Archibald Alison {1757-1839) was the 
father] of the well-known historian. Sir Archibald Alison. Though 
Scotch by birth, he was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, took 
orders in the English Church, and held various livings in different 
parts of England. In 1800 he was made minister of the Episcopal 
Chapel, Cowgate, Edinburgh, and the rest of his life was spent in 
the Scottish capital. He published various sermons, of which those 
on the seasons were specially admired. Brougham is said to have 
called the sermon on autumn "one of the finest pieces of compo- 
sition in the language." Alison's Essay on the Nature and Principles 
of Taste appeared in 1790; the second edition (181 1) gave occasion 
for Jeffrey's review, which was published in the Edinburgh for May, 
181 1. Jeffrey's article was afterwards enlarged and included in 
the Encyclopcedia Britannica, where it formed the discussion on 
Beauty. It was omitted in the ninth edition. To examine 
adequately the theory that Jeffrey expounds would require a 
complete essay and a consideration of many difficult questions. The 
reader who may be interested in determining the precise grounds on 
which Lord Jeffrey's theory is discredited may find them convinc- 
ingly set forth in the Westminster Review, LIII, 1-58, April, 1850. 
He may also consult Prof. Knight's Philosophy of the Beautifil, 
London, 1893, P^''* "> 39~4S' ^^ °"^ contends to-day that a 
man's individual experience has manufactured his sense of beauty ; 



NOTES. 207 

or that the associations that are drawn from his past life, as an 
independent, conscious being, can account for his delight in the 
contemplation of a beautiful object. Cf. Spencer's Principles of 
Psychology, New York, 1873, ^I' P- ^3^ ^* The extracts in the text, 
then, are given, not because of any permanent worth in the theory 
they express, but because of their historical significance and 
because of the light they throw on Jeffrey's principles of criticism 
and ways of conceiving of literature. Cf. Introduction, p. xxiv. 

149 11. The reflection of our own inward emotions. Cf. the 
comment of Burns in a letter to Alison acknowledging the receipt of 
his Essay. " I own, sir, that at first glance several of your propo- 
sitions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangor of a 
trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, 
than the twingle-twangle of a jews-harp; that the delicate flexure of 
a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of 
the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright 
stub of a burdock, and that from something innate and independent 
of all associations of ideas ; — these I had set down as irrefragable, 
orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith." Poems, 
Songs, and Letters of Robert Burns, Globe edition, p. 489. 

151 33. Material objects. Cf. the review of Knight's Principles 
of Taste, in the Edinburgh for Jan., 1806: " It is hard to say what 
others feel ; but we have often experienced that the sublime of 
natural objects, after the first effect of unexpectedness is over, leaves 
a kind of disappointment, a vacuity and want of satisfaction in the 
mind. It is not until our imaginations have infused life, and 
therefore power, into the still mass of nature, that we feel real 
emotions of sublimity. This we do, sometimes by impersonating the 
inanimate objects themselves ; sometimes by associating real or 
fancied beings with the scenes which we behold. This is that which 
distinguishes the delight of a rich and refined imagination, amidst 
the grandest scenery of Wales or Scotland, from the rude stare of a 
London cockney. The one sees mere rocks and wildernesses, and 
sighs in secret for Whitechapel ; the other acknowledges in every 
mountain a tutelary genius of the land, and peoples every glen with 
the heroes of former times ; — defends the passage of Killicranky 
with Dundee; or rushes with Caractacus from the heights of 
Snowdon." 

154 28. What a man feels to be distinctly beautiful, is beatitiful to 
him. Jeffrey's conclusion, then, seems to be as follows : Any object 
is beautiful to that individual out of whose past it has the subtle 



2o8 NOTES. 

power of evoking strangely-blent chords of pleasure and pain. Any 
object may therefore be beautiful to some special individual. But 
there are objects that have this subtle evocative power over the past 
of " the greater part of mankind," by means of " associations that 
are universal and indestructible." These objects are beautiful par 
excellence ; the ability to create or portray this kind of beauty is the 
characteristic of the great artist, and the ability to recognize it the 
characteristic of the good critic. Jeffrey, however, suggests no 
means of determining abstractly what associations are universal and 
indestructible, and hence no means of discriminating in thought 
between a man's own peculiar objects of beauty and those objects 
which may be regarded as universally or absolutely beautiful. 
Jeffrey's standard of beauty therefore becomes purely arbitrary. 
He has to appeal £or a decision as regards the relative worth of 
associations and emotions to the taste of a capriciously chosen 
minority. Cf. his essay on the Lady of the Lake, p. 39, lines 13-29. 
His judges are "persons eminently qualified, by natural sensibility, 
and long experience and reflection, to perceive all beauties that 
really exist, as well as to settle the relative value and importance of 
all the different sorts of beauty." How these judges are to be 
recognized or chosen, — whether, for example, Gifford of the 
Quarterly Review is one of these judges, and how they are to settle 
their disputes among themselves, — these are questions that Jeffrey 
leaves unanswered. In other words, Jeffrey can discover no 
objective standard of beauty, and the only escape from absolute 
lawlessness, that he suggests, consists in his offer of himself as 
"self-constituted judge of poesy." 

155 11. The best taste . . . belongs to the best affections. It seems 
singular that Jeffrey could have maintained this belief after a glance 
at his most intimate friends. Sydney Smith, for example, was a 
man of overflowing social sympathies, of quick and lively fancy, of 
great readiness of observation ; yet he had only the slightest interest 
in art ; he boasted of having spent but fifteen minutes in the Louvre; 
and in all his book-reviews there is no trace of appreciation of 
beauties of style, or of the purely artistic qualities of prose or of 
verse. 

155 16. Sensibility and social sympathies. It is interesting to 
note how this theory of the nature of beauty falls in with Jeffrey's 
principles and practice in literary criticism, — particularly with his 
ethical interpretation of literature. The recognition of beauty 
depends, in Jeffrey's view of the matter, wholly on a man's uncon- 



NOTES. 209 

scious revival of past emotions of sympathy with his fellows. 
Accordingly, a man who has been immersed in himself, and has felt 
no love or pity for his kind, will have a very narrow range of 
aesthetic emotion ; and a man who has loved, or pitied, or feared, or 
hated on wrong occasions, /. <?., immorally, will have a debased and 
ignoble taste in art. On this theory of the origin of taste, it is plain 
that the ethical value of literature, the moral spirit of an author, 
must assume for the critic a great importance; and that the 
discussion of an author's moral tone will be in the highest degree 
necessary, not simply because of the moral influence his writings will 
be likely to exert, but because the key to the writer's feeling for the 
beautiful is likely to be found in his moral feelings. From this 
point of view, then, Jeffrey's development of the ethical criticism of 
literature, — a kind of criticism for which in the introduction to his 
collected essays he takes special credit, — is seen to follow neces- 
sarily from his general theory of art. Cf. Introduction, p. xxv. 

159. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. This was, of course, 
Carlyle's translation of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Jeffrey's 
specific judgments on the book are worthless, but his speculations 
on the relation between National Character and National Taste are 
worth preserving, and should be compared with his ideas on the 
same subject as expressed in the essay on Madame de Stael's De la 
Litterature (1812), and in the essay on the Memoirs of Baber (1827). 
An increase in Jeffrey's firmness of grasp on at least the theory of 
the historical method is certainly noticeable. 

159 7. Htttnan nature . . . fundamentally the same. Cf. Jeffrey's 
conclusion, two years later, touching " inherent " differences of char- 
acter between Asiatic and European races. See the essay on the 
Memoirs of Baber, p. 180 ff. 

159 11. Two great classes. This passage recalls Taine's classifica- 
tion of the forces that shape and determine a nation's literature. 
Such forces may be grouped, according to Taine, under the three 
categories, — race, milieu, moment, race, surroundings, and epoch. 
"What we call the race," Taine explains, "are the innate and 
hereditary dispositions which man brings with him into the world, 
and which, as a rule, are united with the marked differences in the 
temperament and structure of the body." This element in the 
problem Jeffrey neglects in the present essay ; two years later, how- 
ever, in the essay on the Memoirs of Baber, Jeffrey admits explicitly 
that races differ inherently in character, and after such an admission 
he could hardly have denied the influence of such differences on 



2IO NOTES. 

national literatures. Taine's account of his second class of forces 
is as follows : " Man is not alone in the world ; nature surrounds 
him, and his fellow-men surround him ; accidental and secondary 
tendencies overlay his primitive tendencies, and physical or social 
circumstances disturb or confirm the character committed to their 
charge. Sometimes the climate has had its effect. . . . Sometimes 
the state policy has been at work. . . . Sometimes the social condi- 
tions have impressed their mark, as eighteen centuries ago by 
Christianity, and twenty-five centuries ago by Buddhism." The 
parallelism is unmistakable between this class of causes and Jeffrey's 
" accidental causes . . . such as . . . government . . . relative posi- 
tion as to power and civilization to neighbouring countries . . . prel- 
vailing occupations . . . soil and climate." Finally, of the influence 
of the epoch, Taine says : " There is yet a third rank of causes ; for, 
with the forces within and without, there is the work which they 
have already produced together, and this work itself contributes t6 
produce that which follows. ... It is with a people as with a plant ; 
the same sap, under the same temperature, and in the same soif, 
produces, at different steps of its progressive development, different 
formations, buds, flowers, fruits, seed-vessels, in such a manner that 
the one which follows must always be preceded by the former, and 
must spring up from its death." All these influences, which Taine 
includes under the general name of epoch, correspond precisely to 
those that Jeffrey has in mind when he speaks of " the newness or 
antiquity" of a society, and of the various stages, through which 
nations inevitably pass, in their *' progress from rudeness to refine- 
ment." In this essay, then, Jeffrey anticipates very strikingly the 
points of view, the analysis, and the classification of facts, that Taine 
did so much to make popular forty years later, in the Introduction to 
his Histoire de la littirature anglaise. For Taine's theory see his 
History of English Literature, Van Laun's translation. New Yorlc, 
1 89 1, Introduction. For suggestive criticisms on Taine's position 
see Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du lundi, Paris, 3d ed., XIII, p. 249 ff.'; 
Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologic contemporaine, Paris, 1887, 
I, p. 180 ff; £mile Hennequin, La critique scientifique, Paris, 1888, 
pp. 93-127. 

161 31. The Taste of the Nation. The reader should bear in mind 
Jeffrey's theory of Beauty, as expounded in the article on the Nature 
and Principles of Taste, p. 149 ff. Objects are beautiful according 
as they wake in the mind echoes of past passions, — love, bate, pity, 
fear, — which have been associated with these objects in actual experi^ 



NOTES. 211 

ence. Now it is at once plain that such widely differing civilizations 
as those Jeffrey describes in the text would lead to wide and radical 
differences in the associations of pleasure and pain that would cling 
about the same object in two different nations. Hence, the same 
object would have wholly different aesthetic values for two different 
nations. In some such way as this Jeffrey would apply his theory of 
Beauty to explain the variations in national standards of Taste. 

163 14. On anything so purely accidental. Jeffrey is here not far 
from the view of the modern scientific critic, — from that of 
Taine, for example. To be sure, Jeffrey regards the character of 
Shakspere and the characters of other writers as " on the whole 
casual " ; but by this phrase he merely denotes that residuum of 
inexplicableness in every individuality that defies the keenest 
scientific analysis. Such a residuum remains to-day in spite of all 
the advances in physiology and biology, and psychology and 
sociology, and in spite of all the talk about heredity and environ- 
ment. For Taine, as for Jeffrey, individual character was still 
inexplicable, though Taine perhaps brought the " casual " element 
within narrower limits than Jeffrey would have believed possible. 
The important point to note is that Jeffrey pleads in this essay for a 
view of literature that makes it a growth in accordance with law.' 
Shakspere's poetry, he contends, could not have been produced in' 
France ; could have been produced only in England. Shakspere's" 
poetry was therefore determined in character by the milieu in the 
midst of which it was written. Of the nature and degree of the 
influence of the epoch Jeffrey is not so slire ; and of the influence of 
race he has only the vaguest notions. But at least for the time 
being, and in theory, he is convinced that literature is something 
more than the artificial product of ingenious men, who, in writing 
verse and prose, follow idly their own whims and caprices. Cf. 
168-22. 

168 8. Peculiarities of German taste. In trying to account for 
German taste, Jeffrey considers first those influences that Taine 
would group under the term moment^ and secondly, those that Taine 
would class as milieu. Of course the discussion that follows is 
grotesquely inadequate ; it could not fail to be inadequate, inasmuch 
as Jeffrey had only the merest smattering of a second-hand knowl-' 
edge of German literature, and was familiar with German history^ 
only as an intelligent English reader might be familiar with it who 
had kept close watch on current European politics. Of German" 
metaphysics and of German literary criticism Jeffrey was consciously 



2 12 NOTES. 

and proudly ignorant. Under these circumstances, his explanation 
of German taste was bound to be merely a botch of random guesses, 
more or less happy intuitions, and superficially clever generalities. 
A few years later Carlyle undertook the same problem with 
an altogether different equipment and with altogether different 
results. 

168 22. They grew tired of being respected. It seems strange to 
find Jeffrey relapsing here into the superficial view of literature as 
merely the work of clever artificers trying to show skill and win 
fame. His whole preceding argument has tended to prove that the 
literature of any epoch is made what it is because of its spontaneous 
adaptation to the social needs of the times. At least, this is the 
interpretation that a modem reader, familiar with the views of Taine 
and his school, would put on the opening pages of this essay. The 
present passage, however, seems to show that Jeffrey only partly 
realized the conclusions to which his arguments lead. His problem 
is to explain the characteristics of various periods in German 
literature. In trying to solve this problem he does not consider how 
the literature of each period corresponded to the social needs of the 
time, and gave imaginative expression to the ideals of life that were 
current in the period in question. He considers literature apart 
from the life of the times and regards it merely as the work of 
" authors " writing for their own delectation or for public applause. 
He sees that in their choice of subjects and in their methods of 
treatment these authors must have been influenced somewhat by 
surroundings and epoch. But his analysis of the nature of this 
influence is very unconvincing ; and he does not conceive either of 
the life of the German nation or of its expression in the literature of 
its authors as an evolution in accordance with law. This essay is 
almost the only one where Jeffrey ever attempts to use the historical 
method in the study of contemporary literature. His failure here 
shows just how far he comprehended and had control of the method 
in question. He understood in its main principles the theory on 
which the use of the method depends for its justification. He even 
applied the method with some success to explain the characteristics 
of certain earlier periods of English literature. But in the study of 
contemporary literature he never used the method successfully; 
partly because he was more interested in judging than in explaining ; 
partly because he was not broad enough in his sympathies to enter 
into all the conflicting ideals of life and of art that surrounded him ; 
partly because he had no adequate conception of society as an 



NOTES. 213 

organism complex in structure and manifold in functions, and no 
clear insight into the subtle interplay of social forces. 

169 32. Tristram Shattdy . . . Richardson. For a somewhat 
similar account of the influence of English models on German 
authors of the baser sort, see Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, 
Bohn's edition, chap. 23. 

170 1. The fantastical speculations of John Buncle. Thomas 
Amory, the author of The Life of John Buncle, Esq., was born about 
1 69 1 and died in 1788. He is believed to have known Swift, was at 
one time intimate with Toland and other Deists, but later lived 
almost a hermit's life, and is thought to have been not quite sane. 
The first volume of his/<?/^;^ Buncle appeared in 1756, the second in 
1766. The work is a strange compound of romantic adventures, 
rhapsodies over natural scenery, and theological speculations. 
Buncle marries and buries seven wives in the course of his tale, all 
of them beautiful creatures whom he chances upon in his peregri- 
nations through the English lake region. One noteworthy point in 
the book is the author's genuine appreciation of picturesque scenery. 
Hazlitt devotes Number 18 of his Round Table to a eulogy of 
Amory, whom he calls the English Rabelais. Lamb was also a 
reader of Buncle. Cf. his essay on the Two Races of Men. 

173 J. A very curious . . . worh. As the extracts in the text 
deal hardly at all vdth Baber it is not worth while to go into the 
details of his life. The extracts have been given because they 
express Jeffrey's latest ideas touching the influence of race on 
civilization, and because they supplement suggestively the specula- 
tions at the beginning of the essay on Wilhelm Meister. 

180 16. A natural and inherent difference, Cf. 159-7 and 159-11. 



ADVERTISEMENTS 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 



Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature. 

Designed mainly to show characteristics of style. By William Minto, 
M.A., Professor of Logic and English Literature in the University of 
Aberdeen, Scotland. 12mo. Cloth. 566 pages. Mailing price, ^1.65; 
for introduction, ^1.50. 

rpHE main design is to assist in dii-ecting students in English 
composition to the merits and defects of the principal writers 
of prose, enabling them, in some degree at least, to acquire the one 
and avoid the other. The Introduction analyzes style: elements 
of style, qualities of style, kinds of composition. Part First gives 
exhaustive analyses of De Quincey, Macaulay, and Carlyle. These 
serve as a key to all the other authors treated. Part Second takes 
up the prose authors in historical order, from the fourteenth cen- 
tury up to the early part of the nineteenth. 

Hiram Corson, Prof. English Lit- 
erature, Cornell University : With- 
out going outside of this book, an ear- 
nest student could get a knowledge 
of English prose styles, based on the 
soundest principles of criticism, such 
as he could not get in any twenty 
volumes which I know of. 

Eatherine Lee Bates, Prof, of 
English, Wellesley College: It is of 
sterling value. 

John M. Ellis, Prof, of English 
Literature, Oherlin College : I am 
using it for reference with great in- 



terest. The criticisms and comments 
on authors are admirable — the best, 
on the whole, that I have met with 
in any text-book. 

J. Scott Clark, Prof, of Rhetoric, 
Syracuse University : We have now 
given Minto's English Prose a good 
trial, and I am so much pleased that 
I want some more of the same. 

A. W. Long, Wofford College, Spar- 
tanhurg, S.C. : I have used Minto's 
English Poets and English Prose the 
past year, and am greatly pleased 
with the results. 



Minto's Characteristics of the English Poets, 

from Chaucer to Shirley. 

By William Minto, M.A., Professor of Logic and English Literature 
in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. 12mo. Cloth, xi + 382 pages. 
Mailing price, ^1.65 ; for introduction, S1.50. 

rPHE chief objects of the author are: (1) To bring into clear 

light the characteristics of the several poets ; and (2) to trace 

how far each was influenced by his literary predecessors and his 

contemporaries. 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 9 

Selections in English Prose from Elizabeth to 

Victoria. 1580-1880. 

By James M. Garnett, Professor of the English Language and Liter- 
ature in the University of Virginia. 12mo. Cloth, ix + 701 pages. 
By mail, $1.65 ; for introduction, $1.50. 
nnHE selections are accompanied by such explanatory notes as 
have been deemed necessary, and w^ill average some twenty 
pages each. The object is to provide students w^ith the texts 
themselves of the most prominent writers of English prose for 
the past three hundred years in selections of sufficient length to 
be characteristic of the author, and, w^hen possible, they are com- 
plete works or sections of works. 

H. N. Ogden, West Virginia Uni- F. B. Gummere, Prof, of English, 
versify : The book fulfils my expec- Haverford College : I like the plan, 
tations in every respect, and will the selections, and the making of the 
become an indispensable help in the book, 
work of our senior English class. 

Sidney's Defense of Poesy. 

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Albert S. Cook, Professor 
of English in Yale University. 12mo. Cloth, xlv + 103 pages. By 
mail, 90 cents ; for introduction, 80 cents. 
A S a classic text-book of literary aesthetics, Sidney's Defense has 
enduring interest and value. Something of the character of 
Sidney as a man, of the grandeur of his theme, of the signifi- 
cance of poetry, of sound methods of profiting by poetry and of 
judging it, — ought to be disclosed by study of the book. In 
the notes everything is considered with reference to the learner, 
as far as possible ; and the point of view is not exclusively that 
of the grammarian, the antiquary, the rhetorician, or the ex- 
plorer of Elizabethan literatui-e, but has been chosen to include 
something of all these, and more. 



William Minto, Prof, of Litera- 
ture, University of Aberdeen: It 
seems to me to be a very thorough 
and instructive piece of work. The 
interests of the student are consulted 
in every sentence of the Introduction 
and Notes, and the paper of ques- 
tions is admirable as a guide to the 
thorough study of the substance of 
the essay. 

Homer T. Fuller, Pres. Worcester 
Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, 
Mass. : I think every lover of the 
best specimens of good thought and 



good writing in our mother tongue 
must confess his obligations to both 
editor and publishers of such a 
volume as this. First, for the breadth 
and accuracy of the notes; second, 
for the historical research and good 
critical judgment displayed in the 
introduction; third, for the good 
taste and clearness of the type and 
print ; and fourth, for the timeliness 
of the appearance of a volume which 
just at present calls attention to some 
of the essentials of poetry. 



10 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 



Shelley's Defense of Poetry. 

Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Albert S. Cook, Professor of 
English in Yale University. 12mo. Cloth, xxvi + 86 pages. Price by 
mail, 60 cents ; for introduction, 50 cents. 

CjHELLEY'S Defense may be regarded as a companion-piece to 
that of Sidney. In their diction, however, the one is of the 
sixteenth century and the other of the nineteenth. For this reason 
a comparison of the two is of interest to the student of historical 
English style. But, apart from this, the intrinsic merits of Shelley's 
essay must ever recommend it to the lover of poetry and of beauti- 
ful English. The truth which he perceives and expounds is one 
which peculiarly needs enforcement at the present day, and it is 
nowhere presented in a more concise or attractive form. 



John F. Genung, Prof, of Rhetoric, 
Amherst College: By his excellent 
editions of these three works, Profes- 
sor Cook is doing invaluable service 
for the study of poetry. The works 
themselves, written by men who were 
masters alike of poetry and prose, 
are standard as literature: and in 



the introductions and notes, which 
evince in every part the thorough and 
sympathetic scholar, as also in the 
beautiful form given to the books by 
printer and binder, the student has 
rll the help to the reading of them 
that he can desire. 



Cardinal Newman's Essay pn Poetry, 

With reference to Aristotle's Poetics. Edited, with Introduction and 
Notes, by Albert S. Cook, Professor of English in Yale University. 
8vo. Limp cloth, x + 36 pages. Mailing price, 35 cents ; for introduc- 
tion, 30 cents. 

nPHE study of what is essential and what accidental in poetry is 
more and more engaging the attention of thoughtful men, 
particularly those occupied with educational work. Newman's 
Essay expresses the vi'ew of one who was a man of both action 
and theory. Besides this, the Essay is a notable example of the 
literary work of one who has been considered the greatest master 
of style in this generation. The illustrative apparatus provided by 
the editor includes practical hints on the study of Greek drama in 
English, an index, an analysis, and a few suggestive notes. 

Hiram Corson, Prof, of English, 
Cornell University. In its editorial 
character it's an elegant piece of 
work. . , . The introduction is a 



multum in parvo bit of writing ; and 
the notes show the recherche scholar- 
ship of the editor. 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 11 

The Art of Poetry : 

The Poetical Treatises of Horace, Vida, and Boileau, with the trans- 
lations by Howes, Pitt, and Soame. 

Edited by Albert S Cook, Professor of the English Language and 
Literature in Yale University. 12rao. Cloth. 214 pages. Mailing 
price, $1.25; for introduction, $1.12. 

'pHIS volume is intended to meet the wants of three classes of 
teachers and students, those of Latin, French, and English or 
comparative literature. To the first class it will furnish the best 
Latin metrical criticisms, ancient and modern, on poetry ; to the 
second, a classic which every highly educated Frenchman is sup- 
posed to know by heart ; and to the third, an authoritative state- 
ment, by poets themselves, of the canons recognized in the 
Augustan ages of Latin, Italian, and French literature, and, to a 
very considerable extent, in the so-called Augustan period of 
English literature, the reign of Queen Anne. Those who read 
Latin and French will here find the originals, while those who 
read only English are provided with standard translations. A 
full index, containing lists of the Homeric and Virgilian passages 
illustrated and a topical analysis of the threefold work enhance 
its value for the class-room and the private student. 



Bliss Perry, Prof, of English, 
WilUains College : The fullness and 
accuracy of the references in the 
notes is a testimony to his patience 



as well as his scholarship. ... I 
wish to express my admiration of 
such faithful and competent editing. 



Addison's Criticisms on Paradise Lost 

Edited by Albert S. Cook, Professor of the English Language and Lit- 
erature in Yale University. 12mo. Cloth, xxvi + 200 pages. Mailing 
price, $1.10; for introduction, $1.00. 

nPHE text of this edition is based upon the lite^^l reproductions 

of Arber and Morley, and, allowing for the modernization of 

spelling and punctuation, is believed to be more correct than any 

published in this century. The index is unusually full, and will 

enable Addison's comments on any particular passage of Paradifte 

Lost, as well as on those of the ancient epics with which it is 

compared, to be found with the least possible trouble. 

V. D. Scudder, Inst, in English\he welcome as an addition to our 
Literature, Wellesley College: It store of text-books, 
seems to me admirably edited and to | 



1^ HIGHER ENGLISH. 

'What is Poetnj ?' 

Leigh Hunt's An Answer to the Question including Remarks on 
Versification. 

ff}l^^, by ALBERT s Cook, Professor of the English Langua-e and 
Literature in Yale University. 12mo. Cloth. 104 pages Maillni 
price, 50 cents; for introduction, 60 cents. ^^ Mailing 

QNE of the most delightful short papers on the subject of 
poetry is this of Leigh Hunt. Its definitions, its quotations 
and especially its charm and spirit make it peculiarly valuable 
for school and college use as an introduction to a course in poetry 
or criticism. In this edition the quotations are conformed to the 
best texts, which cannot always be said of the ordinary issues 
The notes are few and brief, and have, for convenience, been 
relegated to the foot of the page ; in many cases they are merely 
devoted to locating the quotations employed in the text, an aid 
for which both teacher and student will be thankful. The index, 
as in other books by the saine editor, is a feature of the new 
edition. 

Analytics of Literature. 

^7bt S«^R^,^N, Professor of English Literature in the Universitv 
fntrS'tfon^Ll!''- ^ ""'''' ''' ^^^''' ^'"'^'''^ P"^^' $L40; t^ 
^HIS book was written to embody a new system of teaching 
literature that has been tried with great success. The chief 
features of the system are the recognition of elements, and insuring 
an experience of each, on the part of the learner, according to the 
laboratory plan. The principal stages in the evolution of form 
in literature are made especial subjects of study. 

It aims to make criticism begin on less vague and more exact 
foundations. The discussion in each chapter is in the nature of a 
condensed lecture before laboratory experiment and verification in 
the topic treated. The text-pages of the volume proper are adapted 
alike to students of higher or lower grade, and the treatment, so 
far as left incomplete, is continued in notes provided in an appen- 
dix. To aid teachers not acquainted with laboratory methods, 
hints and suggestions how to set the student at work for himself 
are added to many chapters. 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 13 

Ben J prison's Timber: or Discoveries ; 

Made upon Men and Matter, as they have Flowed out of his Daily 
Reading, or had their Reflux to his Peculiar Notions of the Times. ; 

Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Felix E. Schelling, Professo;r 
in the University of Pennsylvania. 12mo. Cloth, xxxviii + 166 pages. 
Mailing price, 90 cents ; for introduction, 80 cents. 

^HIS is the first attempt to edit a long-neglected English classic, 
which needs only to be better known to take its place among 
the best examples of the height of Elizabethan prose. The text 
— the restoration of which entitles the book to a place in every 
library — is based on a careful collation of the folio of 1641 with 
subsequent editions ; with such modernization in spelling and 
punctuation as a conservative judgment has deemed imperative. 
The introduction and a copious body of notes have been framed 
with a view to the intelligent understanding of an author whose 
wide learning and wealth of allusion make him the fittest exponent 
of the scholarship as well as the literary style and feeling of his age. 



Edward Dowden, Prof, of English, 
Tnnity College, Dublin, Ireland : It 
is a matter for rejoicing that so valu- 
able and interesting a piece of liter- 



ature as this prose work of Jonson, 
should be made easily accessible and 
should have all the advantages erf 
scholarly editing. 



A Primer of English Verse. 



T 



By Hiram Corson, Professor of English Literature in Cornell Univer- 
sity. 12mo. Cloth. iv + 232 pages. By mail, $1.10; for introduction, 
$1.00. ■ 

HE leading purpose of this volume is to introduce the student 
to the aesthetic and organic character of English Verse — 16 
cultivate his susceptibility to verse as an inseparable part of poeti6 
expression. To this end, the various effects provided for by the 
poet, either consciously or unconsciously on his part, are given foi* 
the student to practice upon, until those effects come out distinctly 
to his feelings. 

The University Magazine, iVez« | ous metres, giving examples of usage 
York : Prof. Corson has given us from various poets. The book will 
a most interesting and thorough be of great use to both the critical 
treatise on the characteristics and student and to those who recognize 
uses of English metres. He dis- that poetry , like music, is constructed 
cusses the force and effects of vari- on scientific and precise principles. 



14 HIGHER ENGLISH. 

Fiue Short Courses of Reading in English Litera- 

tare. 

With Biographical and Critical References. By C. T. Winchester, 
Professor of English Literature in Wesleyan University. Sq. 16mo. 
Cloth. V + 99 pages. Mailing price, 45 cents ; for introduction, 40 cents. 

^HIS little book lays out five short courses of reading from the 
most prominent writers in pure literature of the last three 
centuries, beginning with Marlowe and ending with Tennyson. 
The book contains also information as to the best editions for 
student use, with extended and well chosen lists of critical and 
biographical authorities. 

Le Baron K. Briggs, P?^ofessor of | much pleased with it. It cannot help 
English, Harvard University : I am | being useful. 

Synopsis of English and American Literature. 

By G. J. Smith, Instructor of English, Washington (D.C.) High School^ 
8vo. Cloth. 125 pages. By mail, 90 cents ; for introduction, 80 cents': 

/^NE finds here in every case the author's full name, the date^ 
of birth and death, the class of writers to which he belongs^ 
the chronological place of that class in the development of litera- 
ture, his most important works, his most distinguished contemf 
poraries, the leading events of the time, and, in most cases a few 
clear words of explanation or criticism. 



W. B. Chamberlain, P^^of. of 
Rhetoric, Oherlin College : Its clear- 
ness, compactness, and readiness for 
reference must make it one of the 
most useful tools for either teacher 
or student. It gives a vast amount 



of most valuable information in the 
most economical manner possible. A 
very valuable feature is its correla- 
tion of literary with political and 
general historical events. I regard 
it as a decided success. 



Shakespeare's Tragedy of Hamlet 

For the use of Colleges, High Schools, Academies and Clubs. By Car- 
roll Lewis Maxcy, A.B., Associate Principal and Instructor in Eng- 
lish, Troy (N.Y.) Academy. Square 16mo. Cloth. 200 pages. Mail- 
ing price, 50 cents ; for introduction, 45 cents. 

A VERY few notes have been added to explain passages which 
would otherwise be unintelligible. The most famous quota- 
tions are grouped at the end of each act. 

The Philosophy of American Literature. 

By Greenough White, A.M. 12mo. Flexible cloth, iv + 66 pages. 
By mail, 35 cents ; for introduction, 30 cents. 



HIGHER ENGLISH. 15 



The Best Elizabethan Plays. 



Edited with an Introduction by William R. Thayer, liimo. Cloth. 
611 pages. By mail, ^1.40; for introduction, $1.25. 

nPHE selection comprises The Jew of Malta, by Marlowe; The 
Alchemist, by Ben Jonson ; Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher; 
The Tioo Noble Kinsmen, by Fletcher and Shakespeare ; and 2'he 
Duchess of Malfi, by Webster. It thus affords not only the best 
specimen of the dramatic work of each of the five Elizabethan 
poets who rank next to Shakespeare, but also a general view of the 
development of English drama from its rise in Marlowe to its last 
strong expression in Webster. The necessary introduction to the 
reading of each play is concisely given in the Preface. Great care 
has been used in expurgating the text. 

Felix E. Schelling, Professor of 
English, University of Pennsyl- 
vania: This has proved invaluable 
to me in my Seminar. All profes- 
sors of English literature must wel- 
come such intelligent and scholarly 
editions of our enduring classics. 



Charles F. Bichardson, Prof, of 
English, Dartmouth College: The 
book is an excellent one, intelligently 
edited, equipped with brief and sen- 
sible notes, and introduced by a 
preface of real critical insight. Alto- 
gether, it is well fitted for college use. 



A Method of English Composition. 



By T. Whiting B • ncroft, late P'-ofessor of Rhetoric and English Lit- 
erature in Brown University. 12mo. Cloth. 101 pages. Mailing 
price, 55 cents ; for introduction, 50 cents. 



Notes on English Literature. 

By Fred Parker Emery, Instructor in English in the Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, Boston. 12mo. Cloth. 152 pages. By mail, 
$1.10; for introduction, $1.00. 

rPHIS book is a departure from the ordinary mode of teaching 
English Literature. It follows the critical, comparative, and 
philosophical method of the best universities, and combines the 
advantages of the tabulated synopsis of authors and books with 
those of the critical literary history. History, politics, society, and 
religion are studied with the proper perspective in relation to liter- 
ature, and are made to show why literature is necessarily charac- 
teristic of the age that produced it. 



Leroy Stephens, Pt'es. Western 
Pennsylvania Classical and Scien- 
tific Institute, Mt. Pleasant, Pa.: 
Nothing that I have seen compares/ 



with it in the value of the references 
by which liistory and literature are 
kept so closely linked together. 



